Are we all ‘monsters’? ‘The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story’

**SPOILERS AHEAD**

A Ryan Murphy production often starts with a beautifully crafted web of a plot and nuanced characters based on a combination of canon or historical figures, but then somewhere in the second half of the season and definitely the final third, it goes off the rails and just becomes an eye-rolling mess that is meant to be spectacle, but really just a glitter bomb over too many ideas thrown in at the last second.

His best work is when tied to a solid true story that keeps his writing team within the bounds of reality to really flex their development of character skills and the whirlwind of theories a roman a clef can offer.

“Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez story,” the second season in the “Monster” series that featured Jeffrey Dahmer in Season 1, is perhaps Murphy’s best creative endeavor after “American Crime Story: The People vs. O.J. Simpson.”

The reason? It stays on the plane of reality, scandalous and dubious, without a doubt, but without overt political pandering or writers trying to utilize whatever niche subject they studied in college.

As you’ve probably seen on social media, Episode 5, a single-shot, nearly 40-minute basic monologue by Cooper Koch as Erik Menendez describing horrific sexual and psychological abuse, is like being in an intimate Off-Broadway black box theater, with only undecorated and unvarnished playwrights and actors capturing the grit and compulsion of trauma in drama.

But what really stayed with me after watching this series was a newfound love of Milli Vanilli’s “Girl I’m Gonna Miss You,” which is played pretty early into the first episode as an odd choice for the wake of the Menendez parents, and then masterfully again with a much elevated weight during the end of the last episode as the brothers are separated from each other with new prison placements.

Since the murders of Kitty and Juan Menendez (Erik and Lyle’s parents) took place in 1989 and the subsequent two trials until 1997, the nostalgia of the era is a primal and primary character, as Erik and Lyle are dressed and act like some monstrous version of Zack Morris.

Chloe Sevigny, the ultimate ‘90s cool girl, makes full circle as the Boomer mom, Kitty, whose range as the pleading, dying mother with shotgun blasts through her torso and then as the vapid housewife who complains to her therapists about her bratty kids is central to the question of the whole series, “who exactly is a monster?” Or better yet, “is there a monster in all of us?”

Javier Bardem as Juan Menendez is the perfect example of that duality, as the portrayal of him vacillates from domineering patriarch to brow-beaten father whose purchase of $32,000 Alfa Romeo (around $90,000 in 2024 money) for son Lyle was deemed cramped and cheap by the elder child.

The show has received backlash for the posited ideas in the story, namely a consensual, incestuous relationship between the brothers as the real motive for the murder, but the writing is so tight on this series that the idea seems plausible and in some darker ways, always a cheer-able alternative to the father’s supposed abuse.

Nathan Lane as Dominick Dunne being told the violent death of his daughter gave him a “career” and a “perspective” is one of the most poignant scenes, as Lane casts his eyes down in reflection, seemingly to agree with the assessment.

The much-anticipated series was an extravagant yet humble work of art that deserves multiple viewings.