Emmy Winner, ‘All Good Things’ Writer-Producer Marc Smerling Launches Truth Media

Amanda N'Duka
·3 min read

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EXCLUSIVE: Marc Smerling, who co-wrote and produced the Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst-starring drama, All Good Things, has launched Truth Media, a Brooklyn based television and podcast production company. The newly formed company aims is to continue to expand how people think of true crime and will partner with writers, journalists, and audio storytellers to create true crime podcasts to develop into TV series.

Smerling is the producer behind Catfish as well as an Emmy-winner for the popular HBO crime documentary The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst.

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“Catfish is a movie that we expanded into a TV series. All Good Things is a movie we expanded into a TV series,” said Smerling. “You spend so much time so deeply immersed in these stories that they’re hard to put down.”

The inaugural project is A Wilderness of Error, a five-part non-fiction series produced by Blumhouse Television for FX Networks. Smerling will direct and serve as an executive producer. Featuring Errol Morris and based on his book of the same name, the series surrounds one of the most publicized true crimes of the past century, the murder of the family of Army surgeon and Green Beret Jeffrey MacDonald at Fort Bragg in 1970. MacDonald was subsequently convicted of committing the murders and is serving a life sentence although he continues to maintain his innocence.

The series will be accompanied by Morally Indefensible, a podcast series based on writer Joe McGinniss’s journey in telling the story almost thirty years before Errol Morris told the story. It will be released in the months prior to the airing of the FX TV series.

“For many reasons, this story caught the public’s attention. So, there have been multiple TV series and books written about it. We wanted to reinvestigate with an eye on all this storytelling to see whether the narrative replaced reality,” said Smerling.

Smerling, an Oscar-nominee for the 2003 documentary Capturing the Friedmans, ‌created‌ ‌and‌ ‌hosted‌ ‌Crimetown with Zac Stuart-Pontier.

“I wanted to continue to tell crime stories that delved much deeper and had something larger to say about who we are,” added Smerling “Crime is nothing if not the purest distillation of the dark side of the human experience.”

Smerling and Truth are repped by UTA.

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