The Family Plot: Suspicion, Conspiracy, and the “Shadow Pandemic”

In the spring of 2020, as COVID-19 lockdowns began for the foreseeable future, it felt quite obvious that, among a myriad of emergent crises, domestic abuse was suddenly surging. It was a feeling overwhelmed by what it could only speculate. It was a suspicion that emerged from what we already know about the unknowability of domestic abuse — the way it hides itself, and the way it is hidden, more specifically, by the form of the private household.

Since then, there have been considerable attempts to measure this "Shadow Pandemic," as the United Nations would describe it in a report published in the fall of 2021. According to the research conducted since April 2020, one in four women reported that household conflicts had become more frequent, and seven in ten women reported that verbal or physical abuse by a partner had become more common. Some studies at the time claimed that child physical abuse did not increase during COVID-19.1 Yet child abuse is even more rarely reported than partner abuse, with conservative estimates suggesting 70% cases are unreported, with the majority of reporting coming from outside the household, by K-12 educators and medical professionals. While the rates of child abuse during the pandemic offer quantifiable data, these studies more importantly illustrate the enclosure of domestic life, and the conditions of our collective suspicion.

At the heart of the Shadow Pandemic are questions of representation and decipherability. Here, I want to take up these questions in a particular phenomenon of this time: as violence spread across households, proliferating at rates unknown, depictions of domestic violence were streaming everywhere, and in many ways, however indirectly, became a way of talking about (or around) what we could only suspect. Some of the most discussed limited series of 2020 to 2022 — whether in think-pieces, podcasts, or the "water coolers" of online forums — were compelled by suspicion toward the private family household: the quiet racism and suburban terror of Little Fires Everywhere (2020); the violent family secrets in Mare of Easttown (2021); the domestic conflicts and volatile sexuality of Scenes from a Marriage (2021); the horrific abuse at the center of Maid (2021); the nightmare scenario of A Friend of the Family  (2022) — the list goes on. What were we seeking out in these cultural representations?

In the summer of 2020, however briefly, the George Floyd uprisings broke loose the world of "sheltering in place," bound up in the family household as a normative ideal of race, class, sexuality, and gender. While explicitly a revolt against the police, the uprisings emerged in opposition to the violence of the family ideal — what M.E. O'Brien describes in her recent book Family Abolition as "a white supremacist image, a fantasy space of terror that defines the human, the innocent, and the sexually pure."2 Tracing the discourse of family values as an output of neoliberalism, Melinda Cooper argues that historically, the family ideal has been in a state of perpetual crisis, yet "this crisis presents itself in distinct, even contradictory fashion in different political constituencies," and at different junctures of capitalism.3 How did this discourse transform under lockdown?           

In staging an encounter with the family ideal as a political problem, many cultural representations of domestic violence from this time share a sense of suspicion about the private household, but also an impulse towards the logic of conspiracy, as a mode of explanation amidst this Shadow Pandemic. What follows is an attempt to think through this specific tension between suspicion and conspiracy, as it manifests in three popular limited series between 2020 and 2022, each concerning some version of the family plot: the desire to make sense of the family as a site of violence and contradiction in capitalist life.       

"...It's always the fucking husband"

The most-watched show on HBO during the first year of the pandemic was The Undoing.4 This psychological thriller stars Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant as a seemingly happy, successful professional couple with a teenage son, Henry (Noah Jupe). Their family begins to fall apart following the gruesome murder of Elena Alves (Matilda De Angelis), a young mother whose son attends Henry's elite private school, Reardon Academy.

Grace (Kidman) learns of Elena's murder through her friend Sylvia (Lily Rabe), a fellow Reardon parent, who steps out of a work meeting to call her. "No one seems to know anything," Sylvia tells her. "You know, they're looking for the husband. . . . It's always the fucking husband." The next morning, after dropping their kids off at school, Grace and Sylvia are informed by another mother, Amanda (Vedette Lim), that Elena's husband has turned himself in. "It turned out I had actually met him once. He gave me a bad feeling," she tells them, adding, "I didn't realize he was a parent at first; I thought, you know, he worked at the school."

This gaggle of mostly white (and blonde) professional mothers had just met Elena, a Latina artist, earlier that week. Elena joined their fundraising committee to plan the event she attended the night she was murdered. At the meeting to finalize plans for the event, Elena brought her young baby, whom she breastfed at the meeting, much to the shock of the other women. All of them assume that Elena's son attends Reardon on a scholarship made possible by the kind of garish events they are planning — a lavish spread with champagne and David Hockney on the walls, where the first auctioned item is a glass of water for $1,000, all in the name of "diversity" at a school with $50,000 annual tuition.

Grace catches herself making these assumptions about Elena, however, and she begins to find herself instead plagued by suspicions. As soon as she hears about Elena's murder, she starts to replay the strange series of interactions they had in the days before. At the end of the first episode, Grace's suspicions further escalate, when she can't get a hold of her husband Jonathan (Grant), who, after leaving the fundraiser early, seemed to have forgotten his phone the next day, while out of town on a business trip.

The plot of the show is uncomplicated, and articulated indelicately as the conspiracy,  "it's always the fucking husband." Except it's not Elena's husband, it's Grace's husband. For the children, likewise, it's always the fucking father. Upon learning of the murder of his classmate Miguel's (Edan Alexander) mother, Henry asks his mother if she thinks "the father did it" — a question that quickly slides from Miguel's father Fernando (Ismael Cruz Córdova) to his own father. Besides a brief interlude of questioning Henry, suspicion in the narrative is sustained toward fathers only, between Fernando and Jonathan, as well as Grace's father Franklin Reinhardt, played by Donald Sutherland, with those villainous eyebrows doing most of the heavy lifting.

This husband from hell logic is of course foundational to The Nicole Kidman Character^TM — fueled by suspicions towards the actress's NDA riddled divorce from Tom Cruise and the Church of Scientology — as well as The Undoing creator David E. Kelley's brand of melodrama. It's the same logic of their previous collaboration, Big Little Lies, another hugely popular HBO series set to return after much speculation. What's at all unique about The Undoing, within this prolific subgenre, is its casting of Grant. Grant made his career off of mumbles and charm, but has always strained to contain this villainy we encounter in Jonathan (something that's hovered over Grant since those mugshots in 1995). Jonathan's lawyer tries to convince Grace that her husband is "a bit of a dick," but not a murderer. Similarly, it's always been quite clear that Grant is a bit of a dick, even when he's pathetically quoting David Cassidy and apologizing for himself while being rejected by Andie MacDowell. There's a charge of relief one feels in watching Grant unmask himself in this way — something he seemed to have discovered a few years before with the series A Very English Scandal, in which he played the Liberal Party Parliamentary leader and downright scoundrel Jeremy Thorpe.

In The Undoing, we know that Jonathan is definitely a bit of a dick from the start. He's grouchy and complaining before we discover the gallantry of his profession as a pediatric oncologist. "Honestly, staring down cancer every day with children and maintaining a sense of humor all the while? How does he do it?" Sally (Janel Moloney) asks Grace when Jonathan leaves the fundraiser, claiming to be called to the hospital for a patient emergency. "I wonder myself," Grace answers. Yet when we meet Grace, she seems to have no suspicions toward her husband whatsoever. The suspicions only begin to take form sometime between when she learns of Elena's murder and notices her husband's disappearance.

Based on Jean Hanff Korelitz's 2014 novel You Should Have Known, The Undoing finds its focus through Grace's paranoia. As with Jonathan's profession — which itself must come under crisis to ensure his villainy — Grace's profession as a therapist is much of what characterizes her. Being a therapist, the show suggests, works through and accentuates her paranoia. While we observe in a few scenes with patients that Grace is sharp and perceptive (if not deeply inappropriate, though that seems to be unintentional, and nearly always the case with cultural representations of therapists), her paranoia comes from her sense that she should have known better, and that her husband of nearly two decades is in fact a stranger to her. Much of this is conveyed through Grace's eyes: she's often shot anxiously scanning each room she inhabits. In close-ups and through frantic editing, her eyes scream out what remains profoundly unspeakable, and it enlists us in this careful, close viewing of whatever her eyes tell us she suspects.

A year and a half after The Undoing, David E. Kelley cranked out another series, based on a similar recipe. Netflix's Anatomy of a Scandal premiered on April 15, 2022, and was the #1 series for the streaming platform upon its release, dethroning the second season of mega-hit Bridgerton. An adaptation of a bestselling novel by Sarah Vaughan, Anatomy of a Scandal is a limited series about the wife of a Tory PM who gradually realizes that her philandering husband is not just a philanderer but also a rapist.

When James Whitehouse (Rupert Friend) is first accused of sexual assault by a member of his staff, Olivia Lytton (Naomi Scott), his wife Sophie (Sienna Miller) has no idea about much of her husband's "libertine" history during their college years at Oxford. But soon the possibility of violence haunts the household where Sophie attempts to continue parenting their children and keep up appearances in front of their Russian au pair (Violet Verigo) while the scandal unfolds. Whenever she leaves the household, she must endure public scrutiny, which intrudes into the home anyway, whether through social media, television, newspapers, or even her children, who begin asking questions based on things they've heard at school. The household is the only place where she feels she can hide, but it is also the place she needs to hide from.

In both Anatomy of a Scandal and The Undoing, the media raises suspicions and spins conspiracies, while the police and prosecutors create chaos within the family only to eventually restore moral order. In The Undoing, Grace works with the police because it's what she describes to her father as the "straightest line to what's going on." Other than her father, Grace's closest confidante is a lawyer (Sylvia), who confesses that Jonathan had hired her to represent him at disciplinary hearings at the hospital — eventually leading to his termination, another secret within the family — but this is a secret that Grace respects because of the professional context and Sylvia's emphasis on issues of legality. And in Anatomy of a Scandal, this trope is far more heavy-handed. The prosecution counsel in James's trial is Kate Woodcroft (Michelle Dockery), an incredibly righteous woman with a secret of her own: she was once named Holly Berry, and when she attended Oxford, she was Sophie's classmate, and she was raped by James. Through this convoluted storyline, the narrative not only renders the state as just, but as a mechanism whose enforcers are characterized through innocence and even victimhood.

For both Grace and Sophie, the paranoiac wives at the center of these series, truth is imposed from outside the household, through the state, while for viewers, truth is the result of omniscient narration. In each narrative, we are positioned with the suspicions of the wife figure, and beholden to the narration (often warily) as the arbiter of truth. As conspiracies, the series relentlessly re-enact and anatomize scenes of rape and murder in frenzied flashback sequences. Blurred, distorted, and often dizzying, if not nauseating — at one point, compelling Sophie to vomit in her kitchen sink — these sequences together build toward a feeling of certainty about the guilt of these incredibly awful husbands. As fantasies, they offer a resolution, however contrived, to the Shadow Pandemic: a sense of determinacy, against the horrors of that which remains immeasurable.

The Closet and the Staircase

Three weeks after Anatomy of a Scandal's release on Netflix, HBO premiered the first episode of The Staircase, another narrative of domestic suspicion that captured something very particular about the aftershock of COVID lockdowns in the spring of 2022. Adapted from the 2004 docuseries with the same title, The Staircase was based on the trial of crime novelist Michael Peterson (Colin Firth), who was convicted of murdering his wife Kathleen (Toni Collette), who was found dead at the bottom of a staircase on December 9, 2001, in their family home in Durham, North Carolina. As in The Undoing and Anatomy of a Scandal, The Staircase anticipates the conspiracy of husbands. But in stark contrast, it moves away from determinacy and explanation, and towards a far more politically complex sense of irresolvable suspicion. 

Michael Peterson's plausible deniability in The Staircase is not about tricking us. Instead, it's about demonstrating "the slippery nature of the couple's relationship," as Doreen St. Félix suggests: "Kathleen's death, then, is less the devastating, precipitating event in the series than the atmosphere — a physical picture of the conflict that lurks in many human situations but especially in the private lives of the wealthy."5 Nothing is withheld from the viewer about the brutality of Kathleen's death, just the causality. And from the start, there are a number of factors taken into account, including Kathleen's intoxicated state.

Throughout The Staircase, the very architecture of the family household is a site of conspiracy. Like a ghost, the camera weaves through this impressive replica of the real-life Peterson estate, a 9,429 square foot colonial-style house located on a 3.4 acre lot in the suburbs of Durham. "It's got six fucking bathrooms," as Michael later blurts out, trying to sell off the house to pay for his legal defense, exasperated at the property's devaluation since becoming a notorious crime scene. The interior decorating, the landscaping, the backyard swimming pool all flaunt economic security; meanwhile, we see that Michael and Kathleen experience constant pressure to preserve both that security and the house as its symbol. The staircase itself is narrow and enclosed, leading from the hallway by the kitchen up to the bedrooms and Michael's enclave, the office where he writes crime novels and has more recently launched his political career. Soon, we discover that this office is also a closet, where Michael hides from most of his family the truth of his bisexuality.

To the extent that this is just another bad husband narrative, it is also about a haunted house. The attic is infested with bats — and, at several points, Kathleen's attempts to deal with this infestation puts her into danger, as when she precariously stands on a ladder and nearly falls. She frequently trips and verbalizes frustrations with the staircase, which has a steep turn at the bottom, where she eventually dies. Months before her death, Kathleen was hospitalized after hitting her head in the pool, drunkenly. And the more clumsy and alcoholic that Kathleen appears, the more she, like the house, transforms into a source of suspicion.

Like their idyllic suburban household, the Peterson family is not as traditional as they seem to be. Kathleen does the cooking and hosting, fulfilling the responsibilities of a housewife with an unseen housecleaner, but she's also the one with the stable salary, and goes to work each day as an executive at Nortel while Michael works from home. At a fundraising event she organizes for Michael's political campaign, she hides in the staircase to make a work call and later tells him how exhausted she is. Between bottles of wine that she practically inhales to buoy herself, she's stretching in ways that her family can't seem to comprehend. Although Kathleen and Michael have five children in their mixed household, they never had a child together. Kathleen brought to their marriage a daughter from her previous marriage, Kaitlin (Olivia DeJonge), while Michael has two sons from his first marriage — Clayton (Dane DeHaan) and Todd (Patrick Schwarzenegger) — as well as two adopted daughters, Margaret (Sophie Turner) and Martha (Odessa Young), whose parents died mysteriously before Michael and Kathleen met.

Following Kathleen's death, different conspiracies begin to form within the family along bloodlines. Before his public court hearing, Michael is told by his lawyer, David Rudolph (Michael Stuhlbarg), that "In order of importance . . . it's Kathleen's actual, biological family that they really need to hear from. We really need Kaitlin to speak." At first, Kaitlin complies. "My mother would be absolutely appalled," she tells the press. But soon, Kaitlin becomes alienated from the rest of her siblings, and aligns with Kathleen's sisters, Candace (Rosemarie DeWitt) and Lori (Maria Dizzia), who have been meeting separately with the county prosecutors. Margaret and Martha then take on a more intermediary role together, both harboring their own suspicions having to do with the circumstances of their adoption, while the fierce loyalty of Michael's sons begins to unravel.

Throughout the series, Michael's closetedness is framed as evidence of his guilt — especially by the prosecution, but also by the narrative itself. "We've heard so many wonderful stories about your sister this past week," prosecutor Freda Black (Parker Posey) tells Kathleen's sisters. "I just can't imagine she would've accepted this in her home, in her marriage." The prosecution quickly convinces Candace and Lori that Michael murdered Kathleen after she discovered his gay pornography, sharing with the sisters a folder of photographs of nude men, just before revealing photographs from the crime scene. Whether or not Kathleen knew of Michael's sexuality remains an open question, however. Michael and his brother claim that Kathleen was aware of his attraction to men — that it was an understanding that did not stand in the way of their relationship, and might have even been an aspect of their sex life.

The "double closet" becomes the mode of conspiracy most entertained in The Staircase, by the state as well as the narration. Of this metaphor, Kirsten McLean explains that bisexuality is misunderstood as a sexual identity, through "images of the bisexual as promiscuous, needing multiple relationships in order to be satisfied, untrustworthy in relationships, or as 'fence-sitters, traitors, cop-outs, closet cases[.]'"6 Think Basic Instinct or Black Swan. In The Staircase, this trope reinforces "the legitimacy of the heterosexual/homosexual binary," as McLean suggests, and by extension, the binary logic of guilt vs. innocence.

What makes The Staircase distinct among the recent onslaught of melodramas and psychological thrillers about domestic suspicion and violence, however, is how it resists this binary logic. Whereas The Undoing concludes with absolute transparency about the husband's pathological guilt, The Staircase draws out a more knotted set of conflicts, specifically in its conception of the state. While The Undoing and Anatomy of a Scandal restore order through the state, The Staircase raises suspicions about the police, the District Attorney, and the media. Soon after Kathleen's death, Michael starts spinning within his family a conspiracy about the investigation as backlash against his political campaign — and through the course of the prosecution, we see how the politics enmeshed in "Christian family values" are mobilized against Michael as well.

By the end of The Staircase, Michael's guilt is almost undeniable. Based on Kathleen's autopsy report, it's difficult to imagine her death was just a matter of being a clumsy drunk, even though we've seen that such deaths could have been possible at other points. In a twist that seems only justified by the show's true crime premise, we learn that Martha and Margaret's mother died just like Kathleen, at the bottom of a staircase. We learn that Michael has a track record of lying about other things, pitting his children against each other and against Kathleen. But here, the series lingers, unwilling to resolve any of the suspicions it cultivates.

Fantasies of Representability

What underlies each of these series is a desire for representability distinctive to the social conditions and cultural imagination of the Shadow Pandemic. As we all know, any attempt to illuminate a shadow will only obscure its contours, making more shadows in the process. Through conspiracy, each series seeks to understand a much vaster topography of domestic violence within selective terrorscapes. These are households in which, as a prosecutor in Peterson's trial puts it, "things are not what they appear." But of course, the same can be said of any household — it is the very nature of the private household, and its historical function within capitalism. COVID lockdowns merely clarified what was always the case.

As Sophie Lewis powerfully contends in her 2022 manifesto Abolish the Family, "the state's presupposition in tackling the COVID-19 pandemic has been brutally clear: there is no alternative to the family."7 In the era of lockdown, to "shelter in place" was an impossibility for most people. For far too many, this impossibility was due to different forms of housing precarity and houselessness; for many, this was due to the dangers of sheltering. In this time, as Lewis writes, "the family is being re-disciplined. What will happen next?"8

While articulating a collective desire to critique the private family household as itself an instrument of violence, these narratives of domestic suspicion all seek to understand this critique at an individuated, pathological level. Even in making the case that "it's always the fucking husband," these are worlds in which not all husbands are bastards — conversely, only the ones who seem to be good are the absolute monsters, and it might honestly be impossible to properly and consistently distinguish who seems good from who is good (though the question might arise, good according to who?).

In any conspiracy, "the details create the need for a plot," as Kathleen Stewart explains: "it's not that for conspiracy theory everything is always already a rigid, all too clear plot, but rather that the founding practice of conspiratorial thinking is the search for the missing plot."9 Along with other pandemic narratives of domestic suspicion (such as Little Fires Everywhere, Mare of Easttown, Love and Death, and countless other series, as well as films like Don't Worry Darling), The Undoing, Anatomy of a Scandal, and The Staircase take up conspiracy as what Fredric Jameson calls an imperfect mediatory structure "capable of reuniting the minimal basic components [of] a potentially infinite network, along with a plausible explanation of its invisibility."10 The cognitive or allegorical investment in conspiracy "will be for the most part an unconscious one," Jameson suggests, "for it is only at that deeper level of our collective fantasy that we think about the social system all the time, a deeper level that also allows us to slip our political thoughts past a liberal and anti-political censorship."11 Conspiracy, in this case, attaches to and critiques ideologies of the family.      

As narratives of conspiratorial thinking, each series orients toward a much wider social problem, only to withdraw into fantasies of representability. In The Undoing and Anatomy of a Scandal, this fantasy is that of the omniscient narrator — we know that Jonathan and James are guilty because so much of the narrative becomes painstakingly entangled in reenacting violence with gratuitous flashbacks, most hideously in the image of Elena's head being beaten by a sculpting hammer. She looks directly into the camera, begging for mercy, just before impact. As viewers, we not only witness Jonathan's homicidality, but see it from his perspective. Anatomy of a Scandal similarly reaches a point of legibility through such relentless repetition. The more these flashbacks are incorporated into the narration, the more we become certain of James's duplicity and guilt.

Through these horrific visual sequences, The Undoing and Anatomy of a Scandal seem to revel in what is presumed to be unknowable through exhaustive representation — often, in the attempt to bring visibility to what otherwise lurks in the shadows, these series veer towards re-traumatization, if not de-sensitization. By contrast, while excessive in its representation of a woman's experience of violence, The Staircase diverts from the fantasy of the omniscient narrator, and instead indulges a different kind of conspiratorialism, cultivating something far more dangerous in its inconclusiveness.

These narratives share an uncritical suspicion — a drive to witness and consume domestic violence, in a moment of heightened awareness and suspicion — without more deeply questioning the structures in which that violence propagates. Rather than articulating, however imperfectly, glimmers of a social critique, these narratives have a disciplinary function. Conspiracy manages suspicion and partially satiates it, keeping at bay the unconscious desires and critical energies that mobilize it. The family plot, these narratives seem to insist, is the exception, and never the rule.

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Madeline Lane-McKinley (Twitter, @la_louve_rouge_ ; Bluesky, @lalouverouge.bsky.social) is the author of Comedy Against Work: Utopian Longing in Dystopian Times (Common Notions Press, 2022), co-author of Fag/Hag with Max Fox (Rosa Press, 2024), and an editor of Blind Field: A Journal of Cultural Inquiry. She has a PhD in Literature from UC Santa Cruz, where she teaches writing. Her next book, Solidarity with Children: An Essay Against Adult Supremacy, comes out from Haymarket Press in 2025.

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