Married life takes a dark turn in this compelling true-crime thriller
THIS ISN’T a story about happy ever afters. “Not even close,” snarls our host, Matthew Shaer, who doesn’t sound remotely disappointed. Frankly, the title rather spoils it anyway: this, the marriage of Wendi and Dan, a “nice-looking couple” who threw — as recalled one guest — “the best wedding I’ve ever been to”, is going to go south. Indeed, besides the clue in the title, Shaer assures us early on that it all ends in “brutal divorce” (and then some).
And so, podcast’s job is to fill in the backstory in full knowledge of this wicked, foregone conclusion, which duly adds charge to the smallest detail. Dan and Wendi are two “accomplished young lawyers” who met on J-Date. He proposed one sunset at the Sea of Galilee. “Wow, did I win the lottery of life?” he exclaims with zero chill on his blog. They swiftly marry — “the weather was perfect, the venue extravagant” — and move to a big house in Tallahassee, Florida. They’re rich, successful and have a repellent predilection for PDA at friends’ dinner parties.
Of course, nothing is as it seems. Behind the closed doors of their threebedroom colonial, the relationship is rocky; one particularly bonkers subplot involves Wendi writing a semi-autobio- graphical novel to get at Dan. Eventually, while he’s on a business trip, she calls to tell him she’s leaving him and taking their two sons; he comes home to find a stack of divorce papers on the bed. That’s when the revenge plot is activated — and all hell really breaks lose.
If it all sounds a bit like a soap opera, that’s by design. The podcast’s producer, Wondery, has a deft touch for darkly glamorising true-crime stories (it also created Dirty John, about a charismatic conman who seduces an unwitting widower, which has just been immortalised on screen for Netflix).
“What makes a good marriage, anyway?” asks Shaer, provocatively. Something tells me this doesn’t hold the answers.