Ryan Murphy's latest true-crime provocation arrives with the familiar polish of prestige television and the same old appetite for shock. Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, framed as a psychological excavation of one of America's most infamous women, ultimately collapses under the weight of its own thesis. What begins as a promise to revisit a notorious case through a gendered lens quickly becomes a muddled exercise in stereotype, one that treats female violence less as a subject for inquiry than as a branding device.
False Feminist Frame
Murphy and co-creator Ian Brennan appear to be reaching for a larger argument: that women who commit violence are often products of violence themselves, and that the culture's fascination with them is inseparable from the cruelty that shaped them. In theory, that is fertile ground. In practice, the series flattens its women into symbols. They are rendered as the sum of crimes committed against them and the crimes they later commit against others, with little room for contradiction, interiority or social complexity.
That flattening is the show's central failure. Instead of building a layered portrait of Lizzie Borden as a historical figure whose legend has outgrown the facts, the series leans into a familiar true-crime formula: trauma, transgression, and a final, lurid suggestion that violence is the inevitable endpoint of female suffering. The result is not insight but reduction. The show seems to want to critique the culture that turns women into monsters, while simultaneously feeding that culture's most primitive assumptions.
Violence As Shortcut
The problem is not simply that Monster traffics in brutality. True-crime television often does. The issue is that the violence here functions as a shortcut for characterization. Rather than dramatizing motive, social pressure or the machinery of mythmaking, the series repeatedly uses acts of harm to define who these women are supposed to be. That approach may generate momentum, but it also drains the story of moral and historical specificity.
Murphy's work has long been drawn to the spectacle of American deviance, and this series fits neatly into that pattern. But where the best true-crime storytelling can expose systems — class, gender, policing, media obsession — this one appears content to recycle the old template of the "female serial killer" as a category unto itself. The danger is not only aesthetic. It is interpretive. By collapsing distinct women into a single archetype, the series suggests that female violence is legible only when it confirms a preexisting fantasy of corruption.
That is a particularly blunt way to handle a story like Borden's, which has always lived at the intersection of fact, folklore and projection. The Lizzie Borden case has endured because it is less a solved mystery than a cultural mirror, reflecting anxieties about inheritance, domesticity, repression and female rage. A serious adaptation would use that ambiguity to ask why the story persists. Murphy and Brennan instead seem interested in making the legend louder, not smarter.
Prestige Without Precision
The production values may be sleek, but the series' intellectual posture is thin. It mistakes accumulation for argument, layering grim details and psychological insinuation without earning a coherent point of view. In doing so, it joins a broader trend in streaming-era true crime: the conversion of historical women into consumable pathology.
That trend is especially corrosive when it comes wrapped in the language of empowerment or reclamation. Monster gestures toward a critique of misogyny, but its storytelling choices repeatedly undercut that ambition. The women are not allowed to remain messy, contradictory or historically situated. They are turned into cautionary emblems, and the audience is invited to stare at the wreckage.
For viewers expecting a revisionist account of one of America's most enduring murder myths, the series offers something much less interesting: a glossy reiteration of the same stereotypes it pretends to examine. In the end, Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story does not dismantle the legend of the female killer. It embalms it, then sells it back as prestige television.