Ryan Murphy's Monster franchise has always traded in the tension between prestige television and pulp excess, but Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story pushes that formula into something far cruder. What should have been a searching examination of gender, violence, and historical myth instead becomes a hackneyed exercise in provocation, one that treats female criminality as a spectacle to be linked, packaged, and consumed. The series, created with Ian Brennan, appears determined to draw a line from one notorious woman to another, but in doing so it collapses the complexity of both into a single, tired thesis: women are either victims, monsters, or both, with little room for anything in between.
Flattened Women
The central failure of the series is not simply that it dramatizes violence; it is that it seems uninterested in the lives of the women it places at its center except as symbols. Lizzie Borden becomes less a historical figure than a vessel for the show's obsession with female transgression. The same is true of the other women the series attempts to invoke through thematic parallels. Instead of building character through contradiction, social pressure, or historical specificity, the script reduces them to the sum of what was done to them and what they later did to others. That is not complexity. It is a shortcut.
Murphy's work has often been accused of aestheticizing trauma, and this series gives that criticism fresh force. The production appears to mistake repetition for insight, returning again and again to the same visual and narrative cues: blood, accusation, repression, and lurid suggestion. But the accumulation of these elements does not create meaning. It creates noise. The result is a show that gestures toward feminist critique while reproducing the very stereotypes it claims to interrogate. Women are framed as damaged, dangerous, sexualized, and unstable, while the surrounding storytelling offers little beyond the familiar language of sensational true crime.
True Crime As Shortcut
The larger problem is structural. Monster has always relied on the idea that notoriety can be reinterpreted as social commentary, but this installment appears especially thin in its historical imagination. Rather than using Lizzie Borden's case to explore the pressures of class, family, and public morality in a specific era, the series seems more interested in using her as a node in a broader mythology of female violence. That approach may sound ambitious, but it quickly becomes reductive. Historical women are not interchangeable case studies in pathology, and the show's attempt to connect them as if they belong to one continuous criminal lineage feels intellectually lazy.
This is where Murphy and Brennan's method breaks down most clearly. The series wants the prestige of moral seriousness and the commercial appeal of scandal. It wants to appear analytical while remaining shamelessly exploitative. That contradiction is not new in Murphy's work, but here it is especially glaring because the subject matter demands precision. A story about a woman accused of murder, and the cultural machinery that turned her into legend, should be able to say something meaningful about how society constructs female deviance. Instead, the series appears content to recycle the oldest assumptions in the book.
The effect is not merely disappointing; it is revealing. Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story demonstrates how easily contemporary true-crime television can mistake volume for depth and transgression for critique. By trying to link one female killer to another, the series strips away the distinctions that matter most: motive, context, power, and consequence. What remains is a pile of stereotypes dressed up as analysis.
Murphy's Familiar Limits
For all its glossy production values and ominous framing, the series ultimately feels like a creative dead end. Murphy has long excelled at creating worlds that are heightened, stylized, and emotionally volatile, but those strengths become liabilities when they are not anchored by discipline. Here, the show's appetite for shock overwhelms whatever interpretive ambition it may have had. The women at the center are not illuminated; they are consumed by the machinery of the narrative.
That is why the series lands not as a bold rethinking of a notorious case, but as a cautionary example of what happens when true crime is treated as a brand rather than a form of inquiry. The promise of complexity is there in the premise. The execution, however, is a collapse into cliché. In the end, Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story does not deepen the conversation about women, violence, or myth. It merely confirms how easily those subjects can be flattened when style outruns substance.