Larry Rudolph and Lori Milliron in ABC News Studios' 'Trophy Wife: Murder on Safari.' ABC News Studios/Hulu Share on Facebook Share on X Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Print the Article Post a Comment Logo text Dateline had its shot at the perfect title for a December 2022 episode, but it missed the mark. Dani Sloane did not make the same mistake with her directorial debut, Trophy Wife, now on Hulu. She hit the bull's-eye. On Dec. 2, 2022, the NBC newsmagazine program tackled the crazy true story of dentist Larry Rudolph, who in 2016 murdered his longtime wife - fellow accomplished big-game hunter Bianca Rudolph - while on safari in Zambia. (Yes, this is a different American dentist/hunter than the one who killed Cecil the Lion just a year earlier in the neighboring African country of Zimbabwe.) Related Stories Lifestyle 'Washington Black' EP on Telling a Coming-of-Age Story About Identity With Debut Book 'Beyond the Paddock' TV 'Are You My First?' Reality Series Brings Together Virgins Searching for Love The Dateline episode was meh-titled "Safari Story," leaving the perfect one for Sloane to claim. "Trophy wife" is like bagging a 24-point buck, and it was right there - so much so that in 2024, The Hollywood Reporter's own James Hibberd called out Dateline correspondents Keith Morrison, Andrea Canning and Josh Mankiewicz on their episodic-title miss. Great minds and all of that. Trophy Wife: Murder on Safari itself, from ABC News, is also quite good. Sloane got great gets for her turn at the tale, including the mistress herself, Lori Milliron, straight from prison. And then THR got Sloane. Read our Q&A below; all three episodes of Trophy Wife: Murder on Safari are now available on Hulu. *** This feels like a perfect Netflix docuseries to me, but it ended up on Hulu by way of ABC News - how do you feel about where it ended up? We're all living through this age where the streamers are merging and unmerging and the landscape is just changing so swiftly and so quickly ... I think the biggest thing was we needed partners who felt like they were bought into what the vision was, because we were trying to do something a little bit different and a little bit, dare I say, campy and a little bit funny and wacky and absurd. And I do think like you're seeing - there's such a shift in the landscape in terms of big IP stories being the ones that dominate, and so some of these, like, lesser-known crime stories are having a hard time finding a home, because they're not the kind of quote-unquote "sure things." For me it was more about finding partners that really felt like they got what we were doing and where we were going with it. And we really felt like we had that in ABC News Studios. All the way through they were really awesome to us. You have a really strong true-crime résumé as a producer, but this is your directorial debut - why make that jump now with this story? It was always a dream of mine to get to this place. I have been showrunning and producing for a really long time, and I do love that part of the process. I don't think it's something that will ever be completely out of my life. There's something about working with a talented director who has a vision and really helping them kind of hone that and bring it to life that I love. But, you know, obviously I also have, I think, something to say about the world and society and women and these stories. As the years have gone on, directing has really become the goal. So, when I read this story - I mean, look there's so many stories out there. They get so quickly snatched up the minute a really crazy story hits any newsmagazine, it's basically already been optioned for six months before it even came out. There's definitely a competitiveness to this landscape that I think is very real. And the thing for me that I was looking for as I was starting to kind of go down this path of, like, "what do I want to direct and what do I want to say," the stories that have always resonated with me are the ones where the characters and the worlds are so rich. And I do think that those are a bit harder to find, and I think this really fit the bill. It's a perfect title. My colleague thinks you stole it from a 2024 article he wrote that references the Rudolph case. But what is the actual story of landing on "Trophy Wife" for the title? That's so funny. We were - for a really long time - we were actually calling this Larryworld. There's this thing that everyone says ... that, "It's Larry's world and we're all living in it." That's kind of the ethos with which he lived his life. And that was the working title - to the point that I probably still, honestly, call it that most of the time (and did) up until the very end. And I think we kind of realized, like, "OK, no one's gonna probably watch this if it's called Larryworld, because they don't know who Larry is." It's a conce