Work on the series began in the fall of 2020, said Kathleen Lingo, the Times editorial director for film and TV and an executive producer on the project. “It was an opportunity to not only retell the story featured in the magazine, but to extend the timeline to additional events,” she said. “You really get to see how the Murdoch family has been a presence at world events over all these decades.”
Mr Mahler and Mr Rutenberg met weekly with series showrunner Erica Sashin and a team from the Left/Right to work on the script. He took a detailed look at the early years of Rupert Murdoch, the family patriarch and founder of News Corp., in Turak, a neighborhood in Melbourne, Australia. The show has also been involved in developments since the magazine investigation was published, such as the 2021 Capital riots and how Fox News, founded by Mr. Murdoch and now run by his son Lachlan, covered the events of that day. .
Mr Rutenberg said it took some time to get used to the television editing process.
“It’s very hard to go into these and tinker with,” he said. “If we want to edit anything, we’ll have to contact their editors, who will have to rearrange the timing of the entire episode.”
But there were certain aspects that both the individuals liked about the documentary format.
“With a documentary, you can be a little more detailed,” Mahler said. “We didn’t have room in the magazine series to get into things that were a little too tangent, like the strike at Rupert’s plant in Vaping,” he said, citing the workers’ dispute in London, “or the story The Story of Daughter, Elizabeth Murdoch,” are themes that they are able to explore throughout the series.
The TV format gave viewers the opportunity to take in important scenes of Murdoch family history through archival images and video footage.
