Season one of Monsters, writer Ryan Murphy’s addictive anthology TV series about appalling human behaviour, told the story of America’s most notorious serial killer, Jeffrey Dahmer. For Season Two, the showrunner – comfortably the most prolific and successful man in elite TV – has outdone himself, retelling the double murder of Jose and Kitty Menendez by their sons, spoilt Bel Air brothers, Lyle and Erik, in the case that gripped America.
Murphy is not one for sparing the goriest of details in his dramas. Murder most foul is merely the tip of the Menendez iceberg in Ryan’s tread through their tale. Monsters touches blithely on incest, physical, psychological and emotional abuse, too. The TV whiz has form at the grimmest, most salacious end of the psychosexual homicide spectrum. A matricide and patricide is just a new twist on old obsessions. His former, ongoing anthology suite, American Crime Story, covered the murders of Gianni Versace and Nicole Brown Simpson.
To say Ryan Murphy’s TV taste is not shared by everyone is something of an understatement. Scholarly reviewers with posh educations hate him. He is frequently trashed as the blot on the landscape of the age of elite TV drama, sometimes even cited as its natural endpoint. A memorable New Yorker profile early into his ascendancy made specific efforts to mock his camp, low taste, as if gay men have not been dictating the entertainment pace since Epstein signed The Beatles. Yet audiences love him. Monsters is currently the number one show for the global streaming giant Netflix.
Camp is a tricky path to travel openly and successfully. To me, Murphy is in the lineage of Ivor Novello, Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams, just with a popular TV touch. At his best, like Pose, the New York Voguing drama he created, or his intricate retelling of the Monica Lewinsky story, I would say he is touched by recognisable, candid genius.
Murphy first spelt out what he intended to do with TV on the mid-Noughties episodic plastic surgery drama, Nip/Tuck, which you might now see as an early precursor to The Substance, this year’s gay classic movie. His breakout hit, Glee, pointed out the glaringly gay in High School drama clubs. From these two opening hands, I understood his primary references. We’re of similar ages and, I suspect, dispositions. For gay men who weathered the impasse between the illegality and shame of the past and the bells and whistles rainbow flag celebrations of today, TV performed a very specific function in the home. It was where we went to see we weren’t the only one. It shaped our tastes with a forceful, meritocratic hand.
Ryan Murphy has achieved the gay dream
Gay men in our 50s found the ambitions of the teenagers at the New York School of Performing Arts in The Kids From Fame a profoundly affecting metaphor for escape. Top of the Pops and MTV were both practically biblical. Some of us stayed in every Wednesday night for Dynasty, thrilling at actresses in Bob Mackie frocks starting catfights on stairwells. These touchstones of high camp and high drama are riven through Murphy’s work, then applied back to real life. He is the creative spawn not of Aaron Sorkin but Aaron Spelling, with a dash of Bret Easton Ellis thrown in for full eyebrow raising irony. He is the closest we have on the TV spectrum to seeing the inside of a certain type of gay man’s mind at work. That audiences love it delights me.
The Menendez brothers entry into the Monsters hall of fame contains the full palette of Murphy motifs. It’s trite, smart, schlocky and expertly paced. It contains a starry cast with astronomical socials followings. Murphy was the first TV showrunner to cast Kim Kardashian. Next: Mr Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce. Snappy, quotable dialogue. Excellent hair and makeup. Great costume department, evoking a very specific era, down to the finest, most exacting detail, including the right socks. Spotify-able soundtrack. A saturated, fashion magazine camera gaze. This is how TV works best in the digital age, filling in the gaps that make terrestrial shows look so resolutely 20th century, part of a dying entertainment age.
There is a reason gay men of our age, now comfortably into our fifties, with a weathered, chequered past navigating early life lived largely outside the law recognise this stuff. We have experience of society’s margins because we skated so close to them all. We understood what criminality and public shame felt like just by fancying the school heartthrob at 13. When I served jury duty ten years ago, I got a distinct shudder going through the security gates at Southwark Crown Court, imagining what might have been if I’d been caught at any number of my own catalogue of misbehaviours as a teenager, in the simple search for who I was.
Ryan Murphy puts it all on TV, in exquisite, snappy, propulsive detail. I cannot help but love him for it. I can fully imagine him reclining by the swimming pool in the Hollywood mansion his talent has afforded him, tipping a slim cigarette into a marble ashtray, glancing over the word “gratuitous”, the most frequent accusation levelled at him and saying, “the problem being?” Ryan Murphy has achieved the gay dream, telling exactly the stories he wants to on exactly his terms. He is an Aaron Spelling character come to life. For the few not watching Monsters? It is simultaneously amazing and appalling, hitting Ryan Murphy’s sweetest spot, a heightened, exaggerated, stylised art imitating what can be a tough old life.
