One of my favorite reads of the year, Benjamin Stevenson‘s Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, is officially heading to the screen! The project hails from Fifth Season and Made Up Stories, and is based on the 2022 best-selling novel by Benjamin Stevenson. David Hemmingson (The Holdovers) will serve as the project’s showrunner and executive producer.
Who is Ernest Cunningham?
Penn Badgley (You, Easy A, Gossip Girl) will star as Ernest Cunningham, a writer of “how-to” mystery fiction guides who has never actually solved a real-life crime before. He serves as the story’s unconventional narrator who speaks directly to the reader, or viewing audience, in this case. He breaks the fourth wall, skips around the story, and warns you about deaths before they happen.
In Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, Erne’s family gathers at an Australian ski resort to coincide with the prison release of his brother, Michael, whom Erne had previously turned in to the police. True to the title, every member of the Cunningham family has a past involving a fatality, ranging from accidental to intentional. The family reunion quickly turns chaotic when a dead body with a blackened face is discovered on the resort’s golf course.
Is Stevenson’s series Amazon’s answer to Netflix’s Knives Out?
If Amazon plays its cards right, and the show is a hit, it could easily adapt the other books in Stevenson’s Ernest Cunningham series, including Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect, Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret, and Everyone in This Bank is a Thief, which hit shelves earlier this year. I’ve only read the first novel in the series, but own the rest, and plan to read them before the end of this coming winter.
“Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone is a brilliantly inventive series that subverts the murder mystery genre in the most unexpected and entertaining ways. Ben created a world that is darkly funny and wickedly clever,” said Peter Friedlander, Amazon MGM‘s Head of Global Television.
I genuinely enjoyed Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, and I look forward to seeing Badgley in the role of Ernest Cunningham. Ernest is not your typical narrator, which gives the book a unique, semi-serious tone that pairs well with Stevenson’s writing style. Fans of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out movies and Kenneth Branagh’s Poirot adaptations should look forward to this one.
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