TV Talk: Western Pa. native shepherds HBO’s ‘Murder on Middle Beach’

True crime docu-series continue to proliferate and the latest comes with a more personal touch.

HBO’s four-part “Murder on Middle Beach” (10 p.m. Sunday) is directed by and stars young filmmaker Madison Hamburg as he investigates the 2010 murder of his mother, interviewing potential suspects within his family.

Western Pennsylvania native Ron Nyswaner, Oscar-nominated screenwriter of the Tom Hanks-starring 1993 HIV discrimination legal drama “Philadelphia” and writer/director of 1988’s filmed-in-Harmar, Keanu Reeves-starring “The Prince of Pennsylvania,” executive produces “Murder on Middle Beach.”

Nyswaner, who grew up in Clarksville, Greene County, learned of Hamburg’s passion project in 2017 from Madison’s uncle, a longtime friend of Nyswaner’s.

Nyswaner was asked to offer Hamburg legal advice just as Hamburg was about to sell his story as a feature documentary to a Texas-based film company. Instead Nyswaner optioned the project and worked with Hamburg for a year as they prepared a pitch for distributors. Ultimately HBO bought the project, which had been reconceived as a series.

“If you’re a successful producer, you think about what the market is looking for and you don’t go out with something that doesn’t have enough story to do multiple episodes,” Nyswaner said in a phone interview earlier this month. “Networks are very wary about that now. As Madison’s story unfolded we saw it was multi-layered and had stories within stories and it was really beautifully shot.”

Like the Showtime docu-series “Love Fraud,” in which producers hired private detectives, HBO’s investment allowed Hamburg to finance an investigator.

Nysawner said it was important to Hamburg that “Murder on Middle Beach” is not viewed as a typical true-crime docu-series.

“He really is trying to exonerate the people he loves, trying to bring truth and some sunlight into the clouds under which they’ve been living for 10 years,” Nyswaner said. “The engine of the series is Madison’s quest to put his mother’s soul to rest and … find out what happened to her.”

Nyswaner said the goal is to bring attention to this cold case so that, as with the case of the Golden State Killer, amateur detectives may aid in the investigation.

“Murder on Middle Beach” proves affecting in its portrayal of a grieving family and a questioning son seeking to root out the truth. But it doesn’t have enough germane material for four installments – the second episode goes off on a tangent that proves largely fruitless – and it ends at a seemingly premature juncture.

Nyswaner most recently wrote for premium cable dramas “Ray Donovan” and “Homeland.” His future projects include the documentary “Loan Wolves,” about the student loan crisis; a scripted TV series about a gay love story that spans 35 years from the 1950s to 1987 and possibly an under-wraps Pittsburgh-set project called “The Miracle.”