Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan have built a television brand on the promise of re-examining infamous crimes through a glossy, psychologically charged lens. But with 'Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story,' that formula appears to have finally run aground. What should have been a rigorous, unsettling study of gender, violence and historical mythmaking instead reads as a hackneyed effort to stitch together one female killer with another, as though proximity alone could substitute for insight.
The central problem is not simply that the series revisits a well-worn true-crime subject. It is that the show seems determined to force Lizzie Borden into a pre-existing Murphyverse of transgressive women, where female characters are often reduced to archetypes of repression, rage, trauma or monstrosity. In this telling, the women are not allowed to remain complicated human beings. They are flattened into the sum of the crimes committed against them and the crimes they later commit against others. That may create a provocative surface, but it does not amount to serious drama.
Flattened Women, Familiar Tropes
The series appears to lean heavily on the idea that female violence can be explained by female suffering, but it does so in a way that feels schematic rather than searching. Instead of interrogating the historical conditions that shaped Borden's life, the show reaches for the most obvious shorthand: the damaged woman, the resentful daughter, the unstable killer, the inherited curse. These are not revelations. They are genre defaults.
That approach is especially disappointing because the Lizzie Borden case has long occupied a peculiar place in American culture. The 1892 axe murders in Fall River, Massachusetts, have generated decades of speculation, folklore and reinterpretation precisely because the facts remain contested and the cultural meaning remains unstable. A serious adaptation could have used that ambiguity to examine how women accused of violence are mythologized, sexualized and demonized in public memory. Instead, the series seems more interested in recycling the aesthetic of transgression than in understanding it.
Murphy's work has often been accused of confusing provocation with critique, and this project does little to disprove that charge. The show's attempt to link Borden to another female killer feels less like a thematic argument than a marketing strategy: a way to suggest a larger conversation about women and murder without doing the harder work of building one. The result is a narrative that gestures toward complexity while repeatedly retreating into stereotype.
True Crime Without Precision
True-crime television lives or dies on specificity. The best examples do not merely recount violence; they contextualize it, test the evidence and resist the temptation to turn real suffering into decorative mood. 'Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story' appears to fail that test by overloading the material with implication while underdelivering on clarity.
That failure matters because the franchise already carries the burden of public skepticism. Each new installment is expected to justify its existence by offering a fresh angle on a notorious case. Here, the angle seems to be that female killers are best understood as reflections of the harm done to them. But when that idea is handled without nuance, it becomes another form of erasure. It collapses distinct lives, motives and historical contexts into a single, grim template.
The show's broader weakness lies in its inability to distinguish between psychological depth and narrative clutter. A story about Lizzie Borden does not need to be sanitized, but it does need discipline. It needs a sense of proportion, a respect for uncertainty and a willingness to let the evidence remain unresolved where the evidence is unresolved. Instead, the series seems to prefer a blunt thesis: women who are wounded become women who wound. That is not analysis. It is reduction.
A Franchise At Risk
For Murphy and Brennan, the issue is larger than one disappointing series. It speaks to the limits of a true-crime model that increasingly depends on repetition, escalation and shock value. The 'Monster' brand has always promised a confrontation with American violence, but if it cannot move beyond stylized brutality and easy psychological binaries, it risks becoming the very thing it claims to expose: a machine that packages trauma into consumable spectacle.
In the end, 'Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story' seems less interested in Lizzie Borden than in the idea of Lizzie Borden as a vessel for a broader, more sensational theory of female criminality. That is a profound limitation. A story about a woman accused of one of America's most infamous murders should challenge viewers to think harder about gender, power, evidence and myth. This one mostly confirms how quickly those questions can be flattened when a series is more committed to its own brand than to the truth of its subject.
The collapse is not merely aesthetic. It is interpretive. By treating women as interchangeable carriers of trauma and violence, the series misses the very complexity that might have made it worth watching. What remains is a cautionary example of how prestige true crime can become, in the wrong hands, a pile of stereotypes dressed up as insight.