Back in the tabloid-crazed 90s, the major networks would often fill airtime with hastily produced movies based on various tawdry or sensational news stories: the teenage shooter Amy Fisher, the assaulted skater Nancy Kerrigan, the parent-murdering Menendez brothers, and, of course, OJ Simpson. In the streaming era, these stories – long stripped of their quickie currency – are often re-evaluated and expanded into deep-dive miniseries, going for some level of prestige rather than a cheaply attained ratings share. No one has become more prolific at this form of cultural retooling than the producer Ryan Murphy, to the point where it can be difficult to keep all of his anthology series straight. Are the Menendez Brothers filed under American Crime Story, at FX? Or Monster, on Netflix? Is American Horror Story off limits? That’s what many of these are, after all: real-life horror stories, re-enacted by A-list ensembles.
As it happens, the Menendez brothers have the dubious honor of following Jeffrey Dahmer for the second season of Netflix’s Monster, now pluralized to Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story. Over the course of nine episodes, Murphy and his frequent collaborator Ian Brennan explore the history and psychology surrounding Erik (Cooper Koch) and Lyle (Nicholas Alexander Chavez), who were convicted of killing their parents José (Javier Bardem) and Kitty (Chloë Sevigny). The first episode casts a wide net, following the brothers in the weeks following the 1989 murder, before their arrest – it kicks off with a supremely awkward funeral at a Directors Guild facility, because José was in the movie business – and jumping back to short flashbacks of familial dysfunction, murder planning and the killing itself. Right from the start, there’s a tension, not always productive, between Murphy’s tendencies toward campy, gawking horror and the steadier gaze of the film-makers he employs, including the noir specialist Carl Franklin (who directs the first two episodes).
The seeming strategy is to give the audience the gory and gossipy stuff they expect, before zooming in on the sometimes disturbing ambiguities that they may not, complete with multiple points of view on the lead-up to the crime and its aftermath. This means that later episodes are (relatively) more focused than the earlier ones. This is especially true of the format-breaking fifth installment, which unfolds over a single 35-minute conversation during which Erik’s lawyer Leslie Abramson (Ari Graynor) questions him about the horrific abuse he alleges to have experienced at hands of his family, particularly his father. The episode’s director, Michael Uppendahl, starts with a static shot of Koch, with Graynor’s back to the camera, and slowly pushes in throughout the episode until he’s in closeup, communicating in heartbreakingly plainspoken and horrifying detail. Even more than in his scenes opposite Chavez, who plays the older brother as if Lyle is doing a coked-up impression of Tom Cruise, Koch comes across as a forever wounded boy.
But in the next episode – sort of an origin story for José and Kitty – the tone shifts back to semi-inscrutable, half-explained rich-family dysfunction. Even as the specter of multi-generational abuse creeps into this narrative, the repetitive glimpses into the psychology of the Menendez parents fail to deliver much insight – not least because the show’s attempts at fusing multiple points of view amount to endless, back-and-forth rug-pulling. Bardem’s performance has been shaped to emphasize the father’s monstrousness, no matter what the “real” scale of it, yet later episodes feature plenty more speculation about what the brothers may have made up (and who might have done more fabricating).
This is probably supposed to come across as multifaceted. Instead, it’s an exhausting, repetitive alternation between two overplayed notes: the brothers as victims twisted and broken by years of abuse, and the brothers as delusional, sloppy, possibly sociopathic connivers. It doesn’t much matter that actors like Graynor or Bardem skillfully hint at bedrocks of genuine character beneath the intentionally inconsistent writing. In fact, the series’ best elements, like its performances or that indelible fifth episode, only throw it further out of balance.
Maybe it’s simply a question of whether this material truly demands eight or nine hours. Surely it deserves more nuance than a 96-minute network TV cheapie from back in the day, but does it need the length of four feature films? (In the 1990s, this much material about the Menendez case could have filled a prime-time schedule for the better part of a week.) Monsters attempts to justify this epic length by tying its events into a bigger story of Los Angeles in the 90s – riots, earthquakes, and, yes, OJ himself – and winds up grasping at straws, particularly with a crime writer character played by Nathan Lane. The show has some intensely grabby moments, to be sure, but ultimately it plays as if Murphy has burnt himself out on true-crime lore of the late 20th century while inexplicably filibustering about it. Maybe it’s time to give the tabloid relitigation a rest.
Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story is now available on Netflix
