It is not hard to see what drew Ryan Murphy to the case at the centre of his new Netflix offering, Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story. In 1996, the brothers were convicted of the 1989 murders of their parents, José and Kitty; the siblings had gunned down the multimillionaire couple while they were watching television at their Beverly Hills mansion. The guilty verdict came after two high-profile trials, the first of which played out on live television on a relatively new channel, Court TV. America was hooked on the story, which has all the requisite elements for a Murphy adaptation. A brutal crime? A press whirlwind? Vast displays of wealth? Tick, tick, tick.
The prolific showrunner has long been fascinated by causes célèbres that bring together grisly true crimes and sensational media coverage, cases that draw into question our collective appetite for consuming horrors. But just how successfully he does that – and whether the resulting series are interrogative or just flat-out exploitative – can be pretty hit and miss.
Just think about the gap between his 2016 miniseries The People vs OJ Simpson, a well-made and thought-provoking drama overflowing with great performances, and a more recent effort, 2022’s The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, the first instalment in the Monster anthology series that Murphy co-created with Ian Brennan. It was a show that seemed to encapsulate everything that’s wrong about the current cultural fixation on serial killer stories, lingering obsessively over Dahmer’s grisly crimes. The families of his victims spoke out against the way it portrayed their loved ones. So where does this latest drama sit on the Murphy-verse spectrum that runs from thoughtful to tasteless? Somewhere in the middle.
When we are first introduced to Lyle and Erik Menéndez, played by Nicholas Alexander Chavez and Cooper Koch, they seem like obnoxious rich boys, riding through Los Angeles in the back of a blacked-out stretch limo, berating their chauffeur for failing to tune in to the correct radio station. But cracks soon appear. Before long, Erik, portrayed by Koch as the quieter, more fragile foil to Lyle’s pushy bravado, is breaking down in his psychiatrist’s office, making a confession that will push the concept of doctor-client privilege to the limit.
In the real-life trial, prosecutors claimed that the brothers were motivated by money; their defence team, however, said that Lyle and Erik had been victims of sexual, physical and emotional abuse. Monsters leans into the grey areas of the case, suggesting that their reasoning may have been a messy mix of the two.
The show doesn’t shy away from the siblings’ acquisitiveness in the wake of the killing, dramatising their lavish shopping sprees where they’d buy up Rolexes, designer clothes and fast cars (as you’d expect from a Murphy production, all the consumerist trappings of the late Eighties are immaculately recreated in every shopping montage). But if the brothers are monsters, Murphy and co seem to imply, then their parents may deserve that title too. The elder Menéndezes are played in flashback by Javier Bardem and Chloë Sevigny; in the early episodes, Bardem as José seems to vibrate with barely suppressed rage, prone to humiliating his sons both publicly and privately.
Before the murder, the atmosphere in the family’s home is almost unbearably febrile. But moments of high drama sometimes come across as inadvertently camp: one scene in the first episode, in which Sevigny brutally whips a toupee from her son’s head, leaving him bald and morose, feels destined to become a meme. Sequences like this, interspersed with exposition-laden dialogue about the police investigation, mean the tone oscillates from silly to serious.
Thankfully, this latest in the Monster series lacks the gruesome excesses of Dahmer. But it also feels like a muddled mix of the best and worst of Murphy’s oeuvre. It’s likely to please his legions of fans, but may leave his detractors feeling a little queasy.