‘You’ star Penn Badgley set to lead Amazon’s dark murder mystery
If you thought Penn Badgley has moved on from playing a man with a body count, think again. Amazon MGM Studios has given an order for a series based on ‘Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone,’ a darkly comic murder mystery starring the ‘You’ star, who also provides the narration.
David Hemingson ('The Holdovers') writes the project and also serves as the showrunner and executive producer. Badgley stars as Ern Cunningham, a mystery-writing expert who reluctantly returns to Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom for a family reunion, which serves as an opportunity to welcome home his brother Michael from prison, whom Ern sent there in the first place. Events take a turn for the worse when a frozen body is found, more people die, and the whole family’s past catches up with them, since the title doesn’t lie: ‘Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone.’
Fifth Season and Made Up Stories are producing, with Bruna Papandrea, Steve Hutensky, and Jeanne Snow attached as executive producers, along with Molly Allen, Badgley,x and Stevenson himself. This is a reunion of sorts for Fifth Season and Made Up Stories, who have previously worked together on such dramas as ‘Nine Perfect Strangers,’ ‘Pieces of Her,’ ‘Anatomy of a Scandal,’ and ‘The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart.’
Significantly, this adaptation was developed at HBO before moving to Amazon MGM, where it received a green light. Stevenson, whose Ernest Cunningham series currently spans four novels, couldn’t hide his delight at the casting. He was quoted as saying by Deadline: “Penn perfectly captures Ern’s clueyness and cleverness.”
For Badgley, it marks his first major lead role in a TV series since wrapping five seasons as Joe Goldberg on ‘You,’ a role that made him one of the streaming service’s most infamous anti-heroes. He is not set to give up on Amazon anytime soon, having recently finished filming ‘You Deserve Each Other,’ a romantic comedy opposite Meghann Fahy, also produced by Fifth Season.
What sets ‘Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone’ apart on paper is that it’s being pitched as a genuinely funny whodunit, rather than a grim prestige thriller, which means it’s closer in tone to ‘Knives Out’ than ‘You.’ With four books already published and a fanbase that has grown since Stevenson’s 2022 debut novel, Amazon has room to expand this into a multi-season mystery franchise if the first outing does well. Notably, no premiere date has been set yet.
