BBack in the tabloid-crazed ‘90s, the major networks often filled their airtime with hastily produced movies based on any number of tasteless or sensational news stories: the gun-toting cheating wife, the attacked skater Nancy Kerrigan, the parent-murdering Menendez brothers, and of course OJ Simpson. In the streaming age, these stories—long since stripped of their quick currency—are often reevaluated and expanded into in-depth miniseries, aiming for some level of prestige rather than cheap ratings share. No one has been more prolific at this kind of cultural repurposing than producer Ryan Murphy, to the point where it can be difficult to keep track of all his anthology series. Are the Menendez Brothers filed under American Crime Story, on FX? Or Monster, on Netflix? Is American Horror Story taboo? There are, after all, plenty of them: real-life horror stories, reenacted by A-list ensembles.

Coincidentally, the Menendez brothers have the dubious honor of following Jeffrey Dahmer for the second season of Netflix’s Monster, now plural Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story. Over the course of nine episodes, Murphy and frequent collaborator Ian Brennan investigate 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 following the 1989 murder, leading up to their arrests—it opens with an extremely awkward funeral at a Directors Guild facility, since José was in the film business—and then jumps back to brief flashbacks of dysfunctional families, murder planning, and the murder itself. From the start, there’s a tension, not always productive, between Murphy’s propensity for campy, gaping horror and the steadfast gaze of the filmmakers he hires, including noir specialist Carl Franklin (who directs the first two episodes).

The apparent strategy is to give the audience the gory and gossipy stuff they expect, before honing in on the sometimes disturbing ambiguities they might not be expecting, 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 in which Erik’s lawyer Leslie Abramson (Ari Graynor) interrogates him about the horrific abuse he says he suffered at the hands of his family, particularly his father. The episode’s director, Michael Uppendahl, begins with a static shot of Koch, Graynor’s back to the camera, and slowly builds through the episode until he’s in close-up, communicating in heartbreakingly candid and horrifying detail. Even more than in the scenes opposite Chavez, who plays the older brother as if Lyle were doing a coke-fueled Tom Cruise impersonation, Koch comes across as a perpetually wounded boy.

But in the next episode—a kind of origin story for José and Kitty—the tone shifts back to the semi-inscrutable, half-explained dysfunction of wealthy families. Even as the specter of intergenerational abuse creeps into this story, the repeated glimpses into the psychology of Menendez’s parents don’t yield much insight—not least because the show’s attempts to fuse multiple points of view amount to an endless back-and-forth. Bardem’s performance is designed to emphasize the father’s monstrosity, regardless of its “real” extent, but later episodes offer far more speculation about what the brothers might have been up to (and who might have been up to more).

This is probably meant to come across as multifaceted. Instead, it’s an exhausting, repetitive alternating between two overblown notes: the brothers as victims, twisted and broken by years of abuse, and the brothers as delusional, sloppy, possibly sociopathic conspirators. It doesn’t matter much that actors like Graynor or Bardem expertly hint at the foundations of genuine character beneath the willfully inconsistent writing. In fact, the show’s best elements, like the performances or that indelible fifth episode, only serve to throw it off balance further.

Maybe it’s just a matter of whether this material really deserves eight hours or nine. Surely it deserves more nuance than a cheap 96-minute TV series of yore, 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 its epic length by tying its events into a larger narrative about 1990s Los Angeles—riots, earthquakes, and, yes, OJ himself—and ultimately grasps at straws, most notably with a crime writer played by Nathan Lane. The series certainly has some intensely gripping moments, but ultimately it feels like Murphy has exhausted himself on late-20th-century true-crime lore while inexplicably filibustering it. Maybe it’s time to put the tabloids to rest.