It’s time for Netflix to slay its Monster

This confounding comparison gives you a sense of what the team behind The Lizzie Borden Story aimed for: a comical, gratuitous, and fairly disgusting take on its titular protagonist; a take divorced from reality that refuses to examine why her case captured national attention. Lizzie, accused and acquitted of butchering Andrew and Abby with an axe in 1892, remains a fascinating figure to date largely because the truth remains a mystery. Did Lizzie Borden really kill her bitter father and cruel stepmother? Was it an intruder? Someone else entirely? Was she romantically involved with Bridget at all? We may never know for certain, but Murphy and Brennan revel in how their version of Lizzie and Bridget got away with murder, enough for Aileen to be obsessed and inspired by them. Monster doesn’t dig into Aileen’s tragic backstory either. Instead, it fabricates several details to support the so-called parallels between Aileen (who was convicted, imprisoned, and executed for killing seven men) and Lizzie (who continued living in her hometown of Fall River, MA before dying of pneumonia at 66). 

Anyone familiar with Monster knows to expect a certain amount of flippancy from it—season three ended with Ed Gein (Hunnam) hallucinating that he helped the FBI nab Ted Bundy. The name Ryan Murphy alone sets an expectation of campy aesthetics and a sexy, sleazy, and heightened approach to controversial topics, as seen with Ratched, Grotesquerie, and All’s Fair, among others. Speaking as someone who didn’t mind this year’s excessive adaptations of The Beauty and The Shards, Murphy’s style does have a certain appeal. But Monster—based on real, horrifying events—has increasingly gotten more and more exploitative and salacious. Running these well-trod true-crime tales through the  Murphy machine renders them into reprehensible spectacle. And for what? The Lizzie Borden Story, with its whimsical tone, reminded me of nothing less than Murphy’s two-season horror comedy Scream Queens. There’s a fake girlboss energy to both projects, except Scream Queens‘ Chanel Oberlin and her minions were fictional characters, not real-life murder victims, being portrayed in an appalling light. 

Monster has never been interested in the root cause of violence; it only capitalizes on it. This time around, the gothic horror pretends to want to understand why women resort to bloodshed, and why it’s different from when men do it. Yet, across the season’s braided timelines—Báthory in 1560, Borden in 1892, and Wuornos in 1989/1990—Monster fails to genuinely examine the female psyche. The show superficially and broadly points the finger at societal injustice, misogyny, and generational trauma. All these women were pushed to the brink, Monster argues, and had no choice but to take matters into their own hands. The show doesn’t unpack the questions it raises about how these women were actually treated by their loved ones and the public. Monster continually leans on bloody decadence to gleefully depict their crimes, particularly when Lizzie lands that crushing blow into Abby and Andrew. 

Season four misguidedly celebrates her actions as a subversive rebellion and randomly reinvents her as a pioneer of the suffragette movement, but Monster glamorizes and romanticizes its subjects to the very end. In the surreal conclusion, Aileen dies via lethal injection in a Florida State Prison in 2002, her execution soundtracked by a personal request: Natalie Merchant’s “Carnival.” When her spirit awakens, Aileen is guided into the afterlife by, who else, her role models. Lizzie tells her, “All is forgiven. All is understood.” If only something could be said for a series as ill-conceived and repulsive as Monster. 

Saloni Gajjar is The A.V. Club‘s TV critic.