BIn the tabloid-crazed ’90s, major networks often filled their airtime with hastily produced movies based on various tasteless or sensational news stories: gun-toting adulteress Amy Fisher, assaulted skater Nancy Kerrigan, the parent-murdering Menendez brothers, and, of course, OJ Simpson. In the age of streaming, these stories — long since ceased to be considered quick-fire movies — are often reevaluated and expanded into in-depth miniseries aimed at a certain level of prestige rather than cheap ratings. No one has become more prolific at this form of cultural reshaping than producer Ryan Murphy, so much so that it can become difficult to tell all of his anthology series apart. Are The Menendez Brothers filed under American Crime Story at FX? Or under Monster at Netflix? Is American Horror Story off limits? That’s what many of these films are, after all: true-life horror stories reenacted by A-list ensembles.
Coincidentally, the Menendez brothers have the dubious honor of following Jeffrey Dahmer in the second season of the Netflix series Monsters, which has since been expanded to Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story. Over the course of nine episodes, Murphy and frequent collaborator Ian Brennan explore the history and psychology surrounding Erik (Cooper Koch) and Lyle (Nicholas Alexander Chavez), who were convicted of murdering their parents José (Javier Bardem) and Kitty (Chloë Sevigny). The first episode casts a wide net, following the brothers in the weeks after the 1989 murder before their arrest—it begins with a deeply awkward funeral at a directors’ union facility because José was in the movie business—then jumps back to brief flashbacks to family problems, murder planning, and the murder itself. From the start, there’s a tension—not always productive—between Murphy’s tendency toward cheesy, gawking horror and the firmer gaze of the filmmakers he employs, including noir specialist Carl Franklin (who directs the first two episodes).
The strategy seems to be to give audiences the gory and gossipy stuff they expect, and then get into the sometimes disturbing ambiguities audiences might not expect, complete with multiple points of view on the crime’s history and aftermath. That means later episodes are (relatively) more focused than earlier ones. That’s especially true of the format-breaking fifth installment, which unfolds over a single 35-minute conversation in which Erik’s lawyer, Leslie Abramson (Ari Graynor), questions him about the horrific abuse he claims he suffered at the hands of his family, particularly his father. The episode’s director, Michael Uppendahl, begins with a static shot of Koch with Graynor’s back to the camera, and slowly moves in over the course of the episode until he’s in close-up, communicating in heartbreakingly frank and terrifying detail. Even more than in his scenes alongside Chavez, who plays the older brother as if Lyle were imitating a coked-up Tom Cruise, Koch seems like a boy who is forever wounded.
But in the next episode—a sort of origin story for José and Kitty—the tone shifts back to half-unfathomable, half-explained dysfunction in wealthy families. Even though the specter of multigenerational abuse intrudes into this narrative, the repeated glimpses into the psychology of the Menendez parents don’t yield much insight—not least because the show’s attempts to blend multiple viewpoints result in endless back-and-forth. Bardem’s portrayal is designed to emphasize the father’s monstrosity, whatever its “real” extent, but later episodes offer much more speculation about what the brothers might have been cooking up (and who might have been cooking up more).
This is probably meant to come across as layered. Instead, it’s an exhausting, repetitive shift between two overused tones: the brothers as victims twisted and broken by years of abuse, and the brothers as delusional, sloppy, possibly sociopathic schemers. It doesn’t matter much that actors like Graynor or Bardem skillfully point to pillars of real character beneath the intentionally inconsistent script. In fact, the show’s best elements, like its acting performances or that indelible fifth episode, only throw it further off balance.
Maybe it’s simply a question of whether this material really needs eight or nine hours. Sure, it deserves more nuance than a 96-minute low-budget network TV show of the day, but does it need the length of four feature films? (In the 1990s, that much material on the Menendez case could have filled a prime-time program for nearly an entire week.) Monsters tries to justify this epic length by tying its events into a larger story of ’90s Los Angeles – riots, earthquakes and, yes, OJ himself – and ends up clutching at every straw, especially with a crime writer character played by Nathan Lane. The show certainly has some very gripping moments, but ultimately it comes across as Murphy having had his fill of late-20th-century true crime history while inexplicably bickering about it. Maybe it’s time to put the tabloid complaint to rest.
