• by Barbara Lippert , Columnist, September 28, 2024

"Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menéndez Story"  is the too-long (nine-episode) slog that has become the number-one dramatic series now on Netflix.

Co-written by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, masters of celebrity murder and mayhem, two words come to mind while watching the series: salacious and exploitative.

Certainly, some of the homoerotic love shown between the brothers (that they have since objected to) could have been excised. One scene, revealing them showering together when their mother finds them, illustrates a story the Vanity Fair writer Dominick Dunne tells a captivated audience at a chi-chi dinner party.

The acting in the series is excellent, with Javier Bardem as José Menendez, Chloë Sevigny as Mary Louise “Kitty” Menendez, Cooper Koch as Erik Menendez, and Nicholas Alexander Chavez as Lyle Menendez.

 But I found the way Nathan Lane plays Dunne cloying and clunky. Dunne’s daughter, tragically, had been murdered, and the murderer was convicted but received a light sentence. So that experience completely biased his take, and he had no business reporting the story.

As is well known, the Menendez brothers committed a single murder some 35 years ago, for which they are still imprisoned. Their story, involving the perverse and vile behavior of two handsome Beverly Hills rich kids, (ages 18 and 21 at the time) has been dramatized and documented many times over the years.  The cold-blooded brutality of their actions never fails to be shocking. But at bottom, the reason remains unknowable, no matter how many people investigate.

Indeed, why would two young adult sons blow their parents’ heads, hands, and other body parts off with shotguns one night while the couple slept in their den?

The prosecution claimed that the kids did it for the family money. Their father, Jose, was a hard-charging, successful Cuban-American exec in the video and record businesses at a time of explosive growth for both.

But even before the murder, both Lyle and Erik had already gotten into petty crime.

Lyle, who got thrown out of Princeton, bought a Porsche and a pile of Rolexes after their parents’ death, seemingly doing the worst Tom Cruise in “Vanilla Sky “impression.

But the boys’ defense was based on their accounts of the constant sexual assault they had endured starting in childhood from Jose, while their mother, Kitty, turned a blind eye.

Kitty reportedly even felt jealous of her sons for the attention they got from their father.

Obviously, it was a deranged upbringing, and there’s more than enough grisly psychopathology to go around in this family.

This is Murphy’s second “Monster” series for Netflix (the word was pluralized for the brothers). The first, “Jeffrey Dahmer,” was excellent. Why was that one so riveting and this one so difficult to plod through?

Maybe because we knew less about Dahmer. The excellent script by Ian Brennan was written from the victims’ point of view and over the years, their stories hadn’t been as sensationalized in the media as the Menendez’s.  And maybe Brennan had his Dahmer script less tinkered with by Murphy.

Episode 5, written by Brennan, is the standout of the series. The camera stays on Erik Menendez’ face (he was the more sensitive brother) as he describes to his lawyer the years of torture he endured from his father and how it destroyed him.  

That’s why Erik called himself “The Hurt Man,” which is the title of the episode.

The series also has some moments of levity, which are hard to process, given the rest of what is revealed.

It’s difficult to integrate this lightness with the overall ghastliness of tone, but the writers plunge ahead.

I vaguely remembered that there was something about a toupee. And there’s always humor found in a hairpiece.

I’d thought that the taller, curly-haired guy, Erik wore it, but it turns out that it was his older brother Lyle.  And we find out about it when Mom gets mad and rips the thing off her son’s head in front of the whole family.

This accounting of Lyle’s fake topper provides clues to his father’s unyielding narcissism and the emotional abuse, on top of the sexual, that he unleashed on his children.  

As Lyle started losing his hair in high school, Jose insisted that the kid get a convincing rug, spare no expense.  Lyle’s thin hair offended his father, who said he was eventually going to move to Florida and run for the Senate, and as a candidate he couldn’t abide a less than perfect family.

Thus, Lyle had to live with the shame and constant coverup.

During his initial time in jail, he obsessed over getting the right glue and pins with which to stick the piece on. Once the thing on his head was revealed to the press, he became a laughingstock.  Current contemporary photos of him now show that he’s a proud bald man.

And (big spoiler alert) we get a major surprise, and big laugh, in the second to last episode, when Erik is shown talking through the wall to the prisoner in the next cell.

He turns out to be a newly imprisoned O.J. Simpson. Apparently, all this is true. In fact, the boys had known O.J. as kids.

They shared a lawyer, Robert Shapiro, at one point. But the brothers had quickly fired Shapiro, because he insisted, knowing how guilty they were, that they go for a plea deal. (Good advice, in retrospect.)

So the irony in the O.J. scene is that Erik tells him to watch out for Shapiro, but to go for a plea deal. (Good advice, in retrospect.)

The idea that there was such a celebrity murderer’s row in the prison at the time is pretty amusing, though their actions were despicable.

In all, it’s an uneasy blend, but still, I guess there’s something about Ryan Murphy, because  I didn’t stop watching.