Ryan Murphy has done it again (derogatory). Fresh off the popular success of Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Storythe man behind it American horror story, cheerfulnessAnd Nip/Tuck is back with another highly questionable true crime series. This time it is about the murder of Kitty and José Menéndez in 1996 by their sons Erik and Lyle in Beverly Hills. The case was a media sensation at the time, with the prosecution claiming that the brothers committed their crime to secure a huge inheritance, and the defense claiming that they killed their parents in self-defense after years of grotesque sexual abuse at their hands father.

Monsters: De Lyle and Erik Menendez Story it’s true crime made for a mass audience, so it’s inevitably sensational. Just as inevitably, Ryan Murphy and his co-creator Ian Brennan have been making the rounds justifying the show’s existence, assuring people that they had the best intentions, and making copious noises about handling things sensitively. “This season is about abuse,” Murphy said at the show’s New York premiere, “who is believed, who is not believed.” In Brennan’s words, “We finally have a language to think and talk about sexual abuse and mental health that didn’t exist back then.”

And inevitably, the show has also received significant backlash. When Dahmer came out, the victims’ families came forward to say that Murphy and co. never contacted them during the making of the program and that they found the series retraumatizing. The Menéndez family has condemned this new show in the strongest possible terms for being both salacious and defamatory, and critics have widely panned it, with specific attention to a scene in which the brothers incestuously enjoy a shower together. This seems particularly eyebrow-raising to me, as there is no evidence to suggest that anything like this has happened, and one thing about true crime is that it is at least assumed to be true. But laxity about facts is not really the core problem The story of Lyle and Erik Menendez. The problem with this season of Sample is that it has no idea what portrait of the people at the center of the story it wants to paint.

I think Ryan Murphy knows that the “right” way to tackle a story where it’s unclear whether or not certain things happened is to leave it ambiguous. That was certainly the reasoning here: that a jury in a trial is presented with two completely different perspectives on the same events and must navigate while simultaneously keeping the two possibilities in their minds. It doesn’t work here for several reasons. The first is that Murphy isn’t good enough at storytelling. The series overall is a mess. There are bewilderingly long dinner scenes that seem to exist purely so that Nathan Lane as journalist Dominick Dunne can provide some vague explanatory background on the sociopolitical goings-on in LA in the 1990s. It’s a shame they put OJ Simpson in this, partly because they decided not to show his face and so all the scenes he appears in bizarrely show us his legs or back, but also because it meant I got to work on the excellent thought PB: Made in America documentary series whenever it came up. Murphy’s exploration of this period was vastly inferior when he produced 2016’s The People v. OJ Simpson: American Crime Storyand here it is even worse.

The second reason The story of Lyle and Erik Menendez doesn’t work, is that the specific nature of the two possibilities you have to keep in your mind – whether two boys brutally murdered their parents in cold blood for money or whether they did it because of a lifetime of horrific sexual abuse – means that characterization is a nightmare in a show where the brothers are the protagonists and where we mainly follow their perspectives. Lyle (Nicholas Alexander Chavez), in particular, is a cartoonish devil who at times fabricates the brothers’ abuse and at other times is a pathetic little boy, with little to no framework to help the audience understand whose point of view about him we are seeing in these moments. different moments.

It’s headache-inducing to watch this show and try to understand what tone it thinks is striking. One episode consists of 29 minutes of genuinely moving testimonies from one of the brothers about how his father raped him, recorded in one take. Elsewhere, Milli Vanilli’s ‘Girl I’m Gonna Miss You’ plays as the two brothers are driven to separate prisons for the rest of their natural lives, or we get ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’ as the boys walk to prison. their house to kill their father and mother. The show attempts to tap into the Tarantino-esque, aestheticized violent appeal of a pair of young, rich, conventionally good-looking guys wearing ’80s prep gear and wielding shotguns, while at the same time sensitively portraying the devastating effects of generations of sexual violence. portray. trauma. It’s a doomed endeavor.

But the third and most important and obvious reason why it doesn’t work is that the Menéndez brothers are real people. This is about as big a minefield as you can imagine. The suspects are still alive, still in prison, still serving life sentences, still maintaining their innocence and claiming they were victims of the most stomach-churning abuse I have ever heard of. But instead of proceeding cautiously, Murphy has decided to happily stomp right through that minefield and watch out for when the mines explode and he gets slaughtered by, say, the real people involved in these cases, or by critics, or by viewers. Erik Menéndez has already criticized Murphy, accusing him of “discouraging slander” and “vile and disgusting character portrayals.”

Cynically, though, Murphy’s approach makes sense. Why not do things this way, when experience shows that he will miraculously come out the other side unscathed and be able to get the support to make another show that is exactly the same? It looks like Netflix and Murphy have learned from this Dahmer wasn’t “it seems like the real people involved in these cases were quite traumatized by the tastelessness of what we did, maybe we shouldn’t have made it” but rather “a lot of people were watching, let’s go again .” Not surprising, I guess, but disgusting nonetheless.

If that was the calculation, then they were right. Indeed, a lot of people watched Monsters. Not as much as Dahmerbut it was still the number 1 show on Netflix the week it was released. So tastelessness and moral doubt be damned, I guess we’ll be doing this all again in two years’ time.