{"id":627374,"date":"2026-09-25T19:32:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-25T19:32:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/627374\/"},"modified":"2026-09-25T19:32:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-25T19:32:09","slug":"its-time-for-netflix-to-slay-ryan-murphys-monster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/627374\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s time for Netflix to slay Ryan Murphy’s Monster"},"content":{"rendered":"

The sixth episode of Monster\u2019s fourth season<\/a> is an insufferable, contrived fever dream. In the Ian Brennan-penned hour, serial killer Aileen Wuornos (Sarah Paulson) spends a night in the childhood home of Lizzie Borden (Ella Beatty), the accused axe murderer who Brennan positions as something of a feminist icon to Wuornos. At one point, while hooking up with her partner, Aileen pictures Lizzie\u2019s dad\u2019s hacked-up corpse on the couch next to them. She later imagines herself dancing with Lizzie and her housemaid\/alleged co-conspirator and lover, Bridget (Vicky Krieps), to Bronski Beat\u2019s \u201cSmalltown Boy.\u201d They groove together in a moment meant to illustrate a shared kinship between Aileen and Lizzie. After all, despite belonging to entirely different time periods, the two are connected simply because they\u2019re\u2026 murderous women?<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the loosely defined, delirious link co-creators Ryan Murphy and Brennan draw in Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story<\/a>, which desperately wants to also be Monster: The Aileen Wuornos Story. Except, a 2003 biographical thriller about Wuornos\u2019 life also called Monster<\/a> already won Charlize Theron an Oscar.<\/a> So now, the stories of Borden and Wuornos are interwoven, along with that of the Hungarian countess Monster wants us to see as their 16th-century predecessor, Elizabeth B\u00e1thory (Krieps), for a far too glib true-crime saga. Take, for example, episode two dropping the needle on Lambrini Girls\u2019 \u201cCuntology 101,\u201d when Lizzie and Bridget try to poison the former\u2019s neglectful parents. Or the result of that particular endeavor, when Andrew (Charlie Hunnam) and Abby Borden (Rebecca Hall) vomit all over their dining room in a lengthy take that director Max Winkler says<\/a> was designed to evoke the experience of watching the fountains of Las Vegas\u2019 Bellagio Hotel.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019t dig into Aileen\u2019s 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).\u00a0<\/p>\n

Anyone familiar with Monster knows to expect a certain amount of flippancy from it\u2014season 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\u2019s Fair, among others. Speaking as someone who didn\u2019t mind this year\u2019s excessive adaptations of The Beauty<\/a> and The Shards<\/a>, Murphy\u2019s style does have a certain appeal. But Monster\u2014based on real, horrifying events\u2014has increasingly gotten more and more exploitative and salacious. Running these well-trod true-crime tales through the\u00a0 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\u2019s two-season horror comedy Scream Queens<\/a>. There\u2019s a fake girlboss energy to both projects, except Scream Queens\u2018 Chanel Oberlin and her minions were fictional characters, not real-life murder victims, being portrayed in an appalling light.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019s different from when men do it. Yet, across the season\u2019s braided timelines\u2014B\u00e1thory in 1560, Borden in 1892, and Wuornos in 1989\/1990\u2014Monster 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\u2019t 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019s \u201cCarnival.\u201d When her spirit awakens, Aileen is guided into the afterlife by, who else, her role models. Lizzie tells her, \u201cAll is forgiven. All is understood.\u201d If only something could be said for a series as ill-conceived and repulsive as Monster.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Saloni Gajjar is The A.V. Club\u2018s TV critic.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The sixth episode of Monster\u2019s fourth season is an insufferable, contrived fever dream. In the Ian Brennan-penned hour,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":627375,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[146,85,46,411],"class_list":["post-627374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=627374"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627374\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/627375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=627374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=627374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=627374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}