Ryan Murphy’s done it again (derogatory). Fresh off the popular success of Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, the man behind American Horror Story, Glee, and Nip/Tuck is back with another deeply questionable true-crime series. This time, it’s about the 1996 murder of Kitty and José Menéndez by their sons Erik and Lyle in Beverly Hills. The case was a media sensation at the time, with the prosecution arguing that the brothers committed their crime in order to secure a massive inheritance and the defense arguing that they killed their parents in self-defense after years of grotesque sexual abuse at the hands of their father.
Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story is true crime made for a mass audience, so it is inevitably sensationalist. Just as inevitably, Ryan Murphy and his co-creator Ian Brennan have been doing the rounds justifying the show’s existence, assuring people that they had the best intentions, making copious noises about handling things sensitively. “This season is about abuse,” Murphy said at the show’s New York premiere, “who is believed, who’s not believed.” In Brennan’s words: “We finally have a vernacular to think about and discuss sex abuse and mental health that did not exist at the time.”
And inevitably, too, the show has received significant backlash. When Dahmer came out, the families of the victims came forward to say that Murphy and co. never contacted them during the making of the program and that they found the series retraumatizing. The Menéndez family has condemned this new show in the strongest possible terms for being both salacious and slanderous, and critics have widely panned it, with specific focus on a scene of the brothers incestuously enjoying a shower together. This does strike me as particularly eyebrow-raising, given that there is no evidence to suggest any of that happened, and one thing about true crime is that it is at least supposed to be true. But laxity about facts isn’t really the core problem with The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story. The problem with this season of Monster is that it has no idea what portrait of the people at the center of the story it wants to paint.
I think Ryan Murphy knows that the “right” way to tackle a story where it is unclear whether or not certain things happened is to leave it ambiguous. Surely that was the reasoning here: that in a court case, a jury is given two wildly different perspectives on the same events and must navigate holding the two possibilities in their head at the same time. It doesn’t work here for several reasons, the first of which is that Murphy is not a good enough storyteller to pull it off. The series is a mess in general. There are bafflingly long dinner party scenes that seem to exist purely so that Nathan Lane as the journalist Dominick Dunne can dish out some vague expositional background on the sociopolitical goings-on of 1990s L.A. It’s a shame that they put O.J. Simpson in this, partly because they decided not to show his face and so all scenes featuring him bizarrely show us his legs or back instead, but also because it meant I was thinking of the excellent O.J.: Made in America documentary series whenever he came up. Murphy’s exploration of this period was very much the inferior one when he produced 2016’s The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, and it’s even worse here.
The second reason The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story doesn’t work is that the specific nature of the two possibilities you’re being invited to hold in your head—whether two boys brutally murdered their parents in cold blood for money or whether they did it because of a lifetime of horrifying sexual abuse—means that, in a show where the brothers are the protagonists, and in which we are mostly following their perspectives, characterization is a nightmare. Lyle (Nicholas Alexander Chavez), in particular, is a cartoonish devil wholesale inventing the brothers’ abuse at some moments and a pitiable little boy at others, with little to no framing to help the audience understand whose viewpoint of him we are seeing at these different moments.
It is headache-inducing watching this show and trying to understand what tone it thinks it’s striking. One episode is 29 minutes of sincerely harrowing testimony by one of the brothers about how his father raped him, shot in one take. Elsewhere, Milli Vanilli’s “Girl I’m Gonna Miss You” plays as the two brothers are driven off to separate prisons for the rest of their natural-born lives, or we get “Don’t Dream It’s Over” as the boys walk toward their house to murder their mother and father. The show tries to lean into the Tarantino-esque, aestheticized-violence appeal of a pair of young, rich, conventionally good-looking boys wearing ’80s prep gear and wielding shotguns, while at the same time sensitively portraying the devastating effects of generational sexual trauma. It is a doomed enterprise.
But the third, and the most important and obvious, reason it does not work is that the Menéndez brothers are real people. This is about as big a true-crime minefield as one could imagine. The accused are alive, still in prison serving life sentences, and still maintain their innocence and allege that they were subject to some of the most stomach-turning abuse I’ve ever heard of. But rather than go gingerly as a result, Murphy has decided to merrily stomp straight through that minefield and take it in stride if the mines go off and he gets slaughtered by, say, the real people involved in these cases, or by critics, or by viewers. Already, Erik Menéndez has slammed Murphy, accusing him of “disheartening slander” and “vile and appalling character portrayals.”
Cynically, though, Murphy’s approach makes sense. Why not do things this way, when experience tells him that he’ll come out the other side miraculously unscathed and able to get the backing to make another show just the same? It seems that the lesson Netflix and Murphy learned from Dahmer wasn’t “seems like the real people involved in these cases were pretty traumatized by the tastelessness of what we did, perhaps we oughtn’t to have made it,” but rather, “loads of people watched, let’s go again.” Not surprising, I guess, but gross nonetheless.
If that was the calculation, well, they’ve been proven right. Loads of people have indeed watched Monsters. Not as many as Dahmer, but it was still the No. 1 show on Netflix the week it was released. So, tastelessness and moral questionableness be damned, I guess we’ll do this all again in two years’ time.