The problem with the messed up Netflix show about the brothers.

Ryan Murphy has done it again (derogatory). Fresh from the popular success of Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Storythe man behind it American horror story, JoyAnd Nip/Tuck is back with another deeply questionable true crime series. This time it's about the murder of Kitty and José Menéndez by their sons Erik and Lyle in 1996 in Beverly Hills. The case caused a media sensation at the time. The prosecution argued that the brothers committed their crime to secure a huge inheritance, and the defense argued that they killed their parents in self-defense after years of grotesque sexual abuse at the hands of their father.

Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story it is a real crime made for a mass audience and is therefore inevitably sensationalized. Just as inevitably, Ryan Murphy and his co-creator Ian Brennan made the rounds justifying the series' existence, reassuring people that they had the best intentions, and making a lot of noise about the sensitive way things were handled. “This season is about abuse,” Murphy said at the show's New York premiere, “who is believed and who is not believed.” In Brennan's words: “We finally have a vernacular for thinking about sexual abuse and mental health and to discuss them that didn’t exist back then.”

And inevitably, the show has also received significant backlash. When Dahmer came out, the families of the victims came forward and said that Murphy and Co. never contacted them during the creation of the program and that they found the series retraumatizing. The Menéndez family has strongly condemned this new show for being both lewd and defamatory, and critics have panned it extensively, with particular focus on a scene in which the brothers incestuously shower together. This strikes me as particularly surprising considering there is no evidence that any of this happened, and one thing about true crimes is that they are at least supposed to be true. But laxity towards facts is not really the core problem The story of Lyle and Erik Menendez. The problem with this season of Monster is that it has no idea what portrait of the people at the center of the story it wants to paint.

I think Ryan Murphy knows that the “right” way to approach a story where it's unclear whether certain things happened or not is to leave it ambiguous. That was certainly the reasoning here: in a trial, a jury is given two completely different perspectives on the same events and has to navigate with the two possibilities in mind at the same time. It doesn't work here for several reasons. The first reason is that Murphy isn't a good enough storyteller to be able to pull this off. The series as a whole is a mess. There are surprisingly long dinner party scenes that seem to only serve the purpose of allowing Nathan Lane, as journalist Dominick Dunne, to provide a vague background on the socio-political events in LA in the 1990s. It's a shame that they put OJ Simpson in this role, also because they decided not to show his face, and so all the scenes he's in bizarrely show us his legs or his back instead, but also because it meant that I was thinking about the excellent OJ: Made in America documentary series whenever he appeared. Murphy's take on this period was far worse than the 2016 production The People v. OJ Simpson: American Crime Storyand here it's even worse.

The second reason The story of Lyle and Erik Menendez doesn't work is that the specific nature of the two possibilities I want you to keep in mind – whether two boys brutally murdered their parents in cold blood for money, or whether they did it because they had endured a lifetime of horrific sexual abuse – That means that in a series where the brothers are the protagonists and where we largely follow their perspectives, the characterization is a nightmare. Lyle (Nicholas Alexander Chavez) in particular is a cartoonish devil, in some moments inventing the brothers' abuses, in others a pitiful little boy, with little to no framework to help the audience understand whose point of view we are in these Films of him see different moments.

It's a headache to watch this show and understand what tone it deems striking. One episode consists of 29 minutes of a genuinely harrowing statement from one of the brothers about how his father raped him, filmed in one take. Elsewhere, Milli Vanilli's “Girl I'm Gonna Miss You” plays as the two brothers are sent to separate prisons for the rest of their natural lives, or we hear “Don't Dream It's Over” as the boys wait for them go to her house to murder her mother and father. The show attempts to capitalize on the Tarantino-esque, aestheticized violent appeal of two young, rich, conventionally good-looking boys in '80s prep gear and carrying shotguns while sensitively portraying the devastating effects of intergenerational sexual trauma. It is a doomed venture.

But the third and most important and obvious reason why it doesn't work is that the Menéndez brothers are real people. This is as big a true crime minefield as you can imagine. The defendants are alive, still in prison and serving life sentences. They still maintain their innocence and claim that they were victims of the worst abuse I have ever heard of. But instead of proceeding cautiously in this case, Murphy has decided to happily trudge through the minefield and take it in stride when the mines explode and he gets, shall we say, from the real people involved in these cases, or from critics, slaughtered by spectators. Erik Menéndez has already harshly criticized Murphy, accusing him of “disheartening slander” and “vile and appalling character portrayals.”

Cynically, however, Murphy's approach makes sense. Why not do that when experience tells him he will miraculously escape unscathed and still get the support for another show? It seems that's the lesson Netflix and Murphy have learned Dahmer It didn't “seem that the real people involved in these cases were pretty traumatized by the poor taste of what we did, maybe we shouldn't have done it,” but rather, “a lot of people were watching.” “Let's go again.” Not surprising, I guess, but still disgusting.

If that was the calculation, then they were right. A lot of people actually watched Monster. Not as many as Dahmerbut it was still #1 on Netflix the week it was released. So tastelessness and moral dubiousness be damned, I guess we'll be doing it all again in two years. Time.