In 1980, Collin County housewife Candy Montgomery hacked to death her lover’s wife, Betty Gore, with an axe.
The creators of Love and Death acknowledge that viewers of the upcoming HBO Max true-crime miniseries will already know that ending — and that it doesn’t matter. Rather, the show delves into the characters and the fabric of 1980s-era Wylie, when a high-profile killing and subsequent trial exposed a scandal and tore apart a conservative churchgoing community.
“If this story wasn’t true, you couldn’t make it up,” said Dallas native Lesli Linka Glatter, who directed all seven episodes. “This is about a Texas town and its characters. I fell in love with all of them, but there’s also a deep hole inside of those characters. It was a mile wide and unfulfilled, so that intrigued me.”
The show immerses us in a community where loneliness and mundanity give way to obsession and lust for Candy (Elizabeth Olsen) and timid businessman Allan Gore (Jesse Plemons), the husband of Candy’s friend, schoolteacher Betty (Lily Rabe). Behind the idyllic façade of faith and family was a secret that became too difficult to conceal and spiraled into madness.
“This was a family and a community that I felt I knew,” said series creator and writer David E. Kelley. “Mining that town completely changed the pathology of the characters. It definitely was a journey.”
Based on two 2013 Texas Monthly articles—written by D co-founder Jim Atkinson and once-frequent contributer John Bloom—the series reunites Kelley with producers Nicole Kidman and Per Saari after their Emmy-winning collaboration on Big Little Lies.
“I felt more like a stenographer on this one,” Kelley said during the SXSW Film & TV Festival in Austin. “The story was so juicy and the characters were complex and human. It’s not often you find a nostalgic, warm community series that ends with an axe murder.”
While developing the show, Kelley approached longtime television director Glatter, who graduated from Greenhill School and SMU. Production took place around the Austin area, wrapping last April. A primary goal was “to be honest to the story and the characters, and have empathy for all of them,” Glatter said. “They had an affair, but they just wanted to be seen and heard.”
For Plemons, who also was born in Dallas, the series is his first major role since earning an Oscar nomination for The Power of the Dog. He plays a supporting role in the upcoming Martin Scorsese epic Killers of the Flower Moon.
“I’m always drawn to characters that don’t reveal themselves immediately, and it takes time to understand them,” Plemons said. “The sort of struggle and predicament that these characters are in felt very universal, but specific to a time and place. The idea that seems prevalent with all of these characters is that there is no hiding from what is true in yourself. It was a lot of fun to explore.”
While the series fits the true-crime mold that’s enjoying a resurgence in popularity — the Montgomery case also provided the basis for a miniseries on Hulu just last year, starring Jessica Biel — Glatter said the approach here is different.
“There is a horrible true crime at the core of this, but we didn’t want it to be just a true-crime drama. Things were not what they appeared to be,” she said. “You have to dig deeper to see what’s really going on. We tried to look at the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ rather than the ‘what.’”
The first episode of Love and Death will screen for free at the Alamo Drafthouse Cedars on April 17. The series will begin streaming on April 27.
Author
