Ryan Murphy's latest true-crime detour arrives with the familiar promise of provocation and the same old appetite for sensationalism. Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, framed as a study of one of America's most enduring murder myths, quickly reveals itself as something less ambitious and far less defensible: a hackneyed attempt to connect one female killer to another through a haze of trauma, repression and gothic excess. What should have been a searching examination of gender, violence and historical mythmaking instead collapses into a pile of recycled "female serial killer" tropes, each one more reductive than the last.
Trauma As Shortcut
Murphy and co-creator Ian Brennan appear to be reaching for a grand thesis about women who kill: that violence can be traced through inherited pain, social constraint and the brutal logic of survival. But the series does not build that argument; it merely gestures at it. Characters are not developed as people so much as as repositories of injury. Their histories are mined for shock value, then arranged into a familiar prestige-drama pattern in which suffering becomes aesthetic texture and murder becomes the inevitable endpoint of female anguish.
That approach is not only dramatically thin, it is intellectually lazy. By trying to link one woman accused of murder to another, the series flattens the differences between them and turns their lives into interchangeable case studies in pathology. The effect is especially damaging because it treats women as the sum of what was done to them and what they later did to others. That is not complexity. It is a crude accounting exercise dressed up as psychological depth.
The problem is not simply that the show is grim. True-crime drama can and should be grim when the material demands it. The issue is that Monster mistakes accumulation for analysis. It piles on abuse, insinuation, sexual repression and blood-soaked imagery, but never earns a coherent moral or historical perspective. Instead of interrogating how society manufactures monsters out of women who transgress, it seems content to recycle the very stereotypes it claims to critique.
Women Reduced To Symbols
This is where the series becomes most revealing, and most disappointing. Murphy has long trafficked in heightened melodrama, but here the style curdles into something more careless. The women in the story are rendered as symbols first and human beings second. One is the victim, another the avenger, another the cautionary tale. Their interior lives are subordinated to the series' larger appetite for lurid comparison, as though the mere fact of female violence were enough to generate meaning.
That flattening matters because the Lizzie Borden legend has always been about projection as much as fact. The historical case has survived for more than a century precisely because it absorbs anxieties about class, gender, domestic power and female rage. A serious adaptation would have leaned into that ambiguity. Instead, Monster narrows it. It treats the women at its center as if they exist to illustrate a thesis already decided in advance: that trauma explains everything, and that violence is the final, inevitable expression of female suffering.
The result is a show that confuses exploitation for critique. It wants the prestige of a serious cultural argument while relying on the cheapest possible shorthand. In doing so, it joins a long line of true-crime productions that claim to humanize women while actually stripping them of specificity. The more the series insists on its psychological seriousness, the more obvious its emptiness becomes.
Murphy's Familiar Failure
For Murphy, this is a familiar failure of proportion. His best-known work often thrives on excess, but excess requires control, and control requires a point of view. Here, the series has neither. It lurches between lurid violence and solemn self-importance, never settling on whether it wants to condemn the mythology around female killers or capitalize on it. That indecision leaves the production stranded in the worst possible place: aesthetically busy, emotionally manipulative and analytically vacant.
The broader problem is that Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story arrives at a moment when audiences are increasingly alert to the ethics of true-crime storytelling. Viewers are no longer satisfied with polished reenactments of suffering, especially when those reenactments recycle gendered clichés. A series that claims to examine women, violence and power has to do more than dress old prejudices in expensive lighting. It has to understand the difference between explanation and excuse, between context and caricature.
Murphy and Brennan do not clear that bar. Their series does not illuminate the women at its center; it uses them. And in the end, that is the most damning verdict of all. What should have been a sharp, unsettling inquiry into the making of a legend instead becomes a hollow exercise in true-crime branding, one that mistakes misogynistic shorthand for insight and leaves behind only the stale echo of a much better show that never existed.