Better Late Than Never — Monsters: The Erik and Lyle Menendez Story
A Brilliant Spiritual Sequel to Much of Murphy’s Earlier Work for FX
Those of you who read my column know that it took me almost a year after the debut of Dahmer on Netflix in the fall of 2022 to eventually watch the series, and even then it was only because of extenuating circumstances. I won’t pretend for a moment it was an easy series to watch or that I’d willingly go back to it but I do think that it was, in its own dark way, a masterpiece. From the technical aspects to the writing to the performances across the board Dahmer ranks with some of the best work Murphy has done for the medium.
Nevertheless I was just as reluctant to watch the second series in this anthology The Erik & Lyle Menendez Story when it debuted this past fall. I suspected I would have to do so for much the same reason I knew that I wasn’t going to have to watch Dahmer. The show had received nominations from the Golden Globes for Best Limited Series as well as other organizations such as the SAG Awards. That still didn’t make me any less encouraged to watch and I spent much of the early part of this year basically stalling with lesser projects. Finally earlier this month I started watching it. And I was riveted in a way that Dahmer just hadn’t managed to do.
As I mentioned in my initial review of Dahmer it wasn’t clear to me immediately that this was a Ryan Murphy type of series. It was darker, grimmer and far less stylistic then what I have come to expect (and appreciate) in more than a decade of watching his work on FX. In Monsters, however, I knew I was watching a Ryan Murphy show within the first five minutes. We first meet Erik and Lyle in a limousine and we see Lyle (Nicholas Alexander Chavez bouncing around, talking about opening a Buffalo Wing franchise and telling the driver to go up front. Erik (Golden Globe nominee Cooper Koch) is more distraught, and weeping. Lyle tries to be a good brother. Then the two of them arrive upfront, and Lyle starts calling out the police for not tracking down the Mafia, and telling the LAPD isn’t doing enough to catch the killers. Then we realize that we’re at memorial for Jose and Kitty. Erik shows up, starts talking about the kind of music that needs to be played and then gives the eulogy, asking them to make sure the right song has been played.
Lyle is clearly struggling with this more than Erik: we see multiple scenes of him reliving the night and then sticking a shotgun in his mouth. On Halloween, he calls his therapist Dr. Oziel (an oily Dallas Roberts) and asks to be his last patient of the day. He asks to meet in public. Oziel agrees to it and they meet in public,
It’s clear Oziel suspects something and after a few minutes of meandering Lyle gets to what we know: he and Erik killed their parents. In a long session Lyle tells Oziel some but not all of the kind of abuse the brothers endured at the hands of their father Jose, played by Javier Bardem.
Bardem has only appeared in a few brief scenes in the three episodes I’ve seen but in them you see a hard, cruel and loveless man to his two sons, physically and verbally abusing them in public and private. Their mother Kitty is less of a presence in only the first two episodes so Chloe Sevigny has made less of an impression. But every so often you get a sense of the sadism beneath the surface. When we learn the darkest revelation at the end of the third episode it makes her blindness — which has been referred to multiple times — seem all the more appalling.
Erik describes how everything unfolded, and we see how the murders played out. As with Dahmer there is no question as to the guilt of Erik and Lyle: we see them commit the murders. Lyle seems by far the most cold-blooded of the two, perfectly capable of shooting his father and mother, then going to a wine tasting and complaining about the quality of the appetizers. Then we hear them make the 911 call.
At a certain point Oziel realizes what he has and is clearly terrified: he calls his secretary and asks him to witness this in case something should happen to him. That threat is very clear as Erik shows up quickly and is far angrier about Lyle having talked. Oziel does everything he can to assure him that they will be fine — but the episode ends with Lyle leaving and saying, “We’ll have to kill him.” It is the fact that much of this episode is scored to late 1980s pop music — and they drive off singing ‘Blame on the Rain’ by Milli Vanilli that makes me sure I’m watching a Ryan Murphy show.
Unlike Dahmer which was always set in darkness even when the sun was out, Monsters is a much brighter and optically dazzling show. This is perhaps a necessity considering the different settings — Dahmer’s murders took place in the slums of Wisconsin; Kitty and Jose Menendez were killed in Beverly Hills — but this has always been a mood that serves Murphy better as it suits his ability to use bright lights, discordant music and visual overkill. That’s not a mark against Monsters; on the contrary it helps set the show as the spiritual heir to his first true crime docudrama The People Vs. O.J. Simpson. (As if to make the parallel clearer Robert Shapiro briefly represents the Menendez Brothers and he’s, if anything, more egotistical and self-absorbed here.) The biggest beneficiary of this, I would say, is Chavez who plays the first three episodes with a clear mania that is based in coke and excess. How much of what he is doing is a pure front is hard to judge at this point but it does make Monsters far more enjoyable than Dahmer which was emmeshed in grimness all the way through. Erik is both driven and clearly not very smart, which gives so many of his plans the air of someone who’s begging to get caught. This leads to the comic highpoint of the series in ‘Brother, Can You Spare A Dime’ when Lyle and Erik are put in lockup and Lyle spends all of his time trying to get correct tape for his wig and is desperate for dimes in order to use the phones. At a certain point he begins to offer to trade his mousse for two dimes and its fun to watch him act as though he’s staying in a crappy hotel and can’t get room service.
Indeed when we get to the trial part, the clear parallels to The People Vs. O.J Simpson become far more obvious, particularly when we meet Stacy Abramson, played by that brilliant talent Ari Gaynor. Gaynor adds a certain amount of relish and compassion to Monsters in the same way that Niecy Nash-Betts added the beating heart in Dahmer. It helps matters that she’s a female defense attorney and Murphy is great for those; it helps still more to hear her being chewed up by Dominick Dunne, played by Nathan Lane. Lane played F. Lee Bailey in People Vs. O.J. Simpson but in Monsters he takes on a role that is closer to Tom Wolfe, who covered the Simpson trial for Vanity Fair. (He was played by the urbane Robert Morse there.) Wolfe was a dispassionate observers; Dunne has nothing but contempt for the criminal justice system. In his mind, the right to trial by jury shouldn’t be given to defendants, they should just be burned at the stake. He has a special reason to feel this way and towards Abramson in particular but there is a vindictiveness to his attitude that almost — but not quite — makes you feel some sympathy for the Menendez brothers.
Like Dahmer, Monsters has already become the subject of controversy, this time because the two defendants are still alive and are trying to win an appeal. (That is still ongoing as of this writing.) There is a darker subtext, of course; not just the sexual abuse that is described but the far darker possibility of incest, which is hinted at throughout the series and is essentially confirmed in the final minutes of the third episode. And there is the possibility of feeling sympathy for the killers in this series, though in the case of Monsters considering what we already know about the trial there was an argument for some of that far greater than Murphy ever went out of his way to make the viewer feel for Jeffrey Dahmer. As of the third episode I’m more inclined to be there for Lyle than I am for Erik, who at this point still seems to be putting on a show for the cameras.
What I do know is that Monsters will be far easier for people to watch than anyone who contemplated watching Dahmer. Perhaps because the crime is far less gruesome then the original, perhaps because the tone is much lighter than the original and more likely because one could just as easily see this being the next installment in American Crime Story without much editing. Indeed Monsters has a far clearer parallel to the first two seasons, the former because we’re dealing more with the criminal justice system; the latter because it’s clear that class and wealth can cover up far darker sexual abuses in our society. I do know that I’m going to enjoy getting through this season far more than I did Dahmer and will have little problem endorsing the show and the performers for Emmy nominations than Season 1. (I have my doubts about what they’re planning for Season 3 — but one monster at a time.)
My score: 4.75 stars.