Lizzie Borden Is the Monster Netflix Can Get Away With
Last Thursday, September 17, Netflix dropped all eight episodes of Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story at once, and within a day the argument had already split down the middle. As of last Friday, September 18, Metacritic had it at 47 from 14 critics, and Rotten Tomatoes had critics at 50 percent and audiences at just 26. It has been called a fever dream and highly watchable in the same week, and nobody has called it boring.
This is the fourth season of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan's Monster anthology, and the first to leave the twentieth century. Ella Beatty plays Lizzie. Charlie Hunnam, last year's Ed Gein, plays her father Andrew. Rebecca Hall is her stepmother Abby, Vicky Krieps is the maid Bridget Sullivan, and Billie Lourd is her sister Emma.
So, two questions for this week. Is it worth eight hours? And should Netflix keep making these at all? Our answer to both is yes. Watch it, mostly for Rebecca Hall, and know that the whole thing works because Lizzie Borden is the one subject this franchise can take liberties with.
What the show gets wrong on purpose
Start with the record, because the show mostly does not. On August 4, 1892, Andrew and Abby Borden were killed with a hatchet in their home in Fall River, Massachusetts. Abby took roughly 18 or 19 blows, Andrew about 11. Lizzie was tried in June 1893 and acquitted by a jury that deliberated for somewhere between 40 and 90 minutes, depending on whose account you read. She walked out calling herself "the happiest woman in the world", bought a house in the Highlands with Emma, named it Maplecroft, and lived out her life in Fall River until she died of pneumonia on June 1, 1927. Emma died nine days later.
The series treats that record as a starting point. Its central romance, Lizzie and Bridget as lovers, has no definite historical evidence behind it. Krieps doubles as Elizabeth Báthory, and Sarah Paulson turns up as Aileen Wuornos, a Florida serial killer who lived nearly a century after Borden, a detour TheWrap's Matthew Creith said the show takes "for absolutely no reason." Beatty herself has described her Lizzie as a "very fictionalized version" of the real woman. Episode titles like "Whack Job!" and "R.I.P (Rest in Pestilence) Abby Borden" tell you the tone before a frame plays.
Why the liberties land differently here
That is exactly what went wrong before. The first season, DAHMER - Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, was a monster hit, 701.37 million hours viewed in its first 21 days, and victims' families accused Netflix of "profiting off their traumatic experiences and retraumatizing" them. With Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, Erik Menendez called the show's version of his brother "a caricature of Lyle rooted in horrible and blatant lies." When the people you are embellishing are alive, or their mothers are, invention is a moral problem.
Lizzie Borden has been dead for almost a century. She was acquitted, so any version that has her swing the hatchet is already speculation, and the case has been fiction's property for generations, from the playground rhyme to stage plays and novels. Nobody is being retraumatized by a gothic Victorian camp opera with a Wes Anderson streak. For the first time, the franchise's worst habit is simply a style choice, and you are free to judge it purely as television.
So is the television any good?
Mostly, yes, if you like your true crime with the blood turned up. The Guardian's Lucy Mangan gave it two stars and called it an "utterly bonkers, blood-soaked, borderline-fetishistic fever dream", and she objected to how much of it is about menstruation, sexuality and graphic violence. She also said it is "absolutely full of great performances", and that is the part to believe, starting with Hall. Creith called her "the real scene-stealer" and wrote that she "understands that the only way to survive material this embellished is to commit completely." The Telegraph's Benji Wilson said she plays Abby with "boggle-eyed relish." When a field this split keeps singling out one performance, trust it: Hall is the reason to press play. Variety's Aramide Tinubu found it "highly watchable" and something "refreshing and wholly unique" in the Monster canon, while admitting it "bends and twists the truth."
The dissent is real. The Hollywood Reporter's Angie Han called it "faux-feminist nonsense" and found "zero nuance" in Hall and Hunnam, which misreads the job, since nuance is not what this material needs, and the A.V. Club's Saloni Gajjar said it "doesn't cut that deep." They are right that it has no thesis about Lizzie. It has a mood, a cast going for broke, and a dinner of bad oysters that director Max Winkler wanted to feel like, in his words, "an Andrea Bocelli symphonic experience." Hunnam, a self-described germaphobe, was not a fan.
The verdict
Watch it. Specifically, watch it if you want a stylish, nasty, very funny-in-places gothic, and treat it the way the Borden rhyme treats history. Skip it if you came for the case, because the show will cheerfully lie to you about it. And Netflix should keep the franchise going, on one condition: keep pointing it at the distant past, where nobody's family is watching. Lizzie Borden proves the formula works best when the only person it can hurt is a woman who died in 1927 and was never convicted.
If the Borden bug bites, there is a lot more Fall River to go around. Chloë Sevigny and Kristen Stewart played the same Lizzie and Bridget romance with far more restraint in Lizzie, which premiered at Sundance in 2018. Christina Ricci went fully camp for Lifetime in Lizzie Borden Took an Ax in 2014, a film she described as "self-aware, campy, and tongue-in-cheek". For the actual record, Sarah Miller's The Borden murders walks through the evidence in order, and Elizabeth Engstrom's novel Lizzie Borden adds a supernatural answer to who did it.
And the Murphy season is not over. American Horror Story returns for season 13 on FX on Thursday, September 24, with Paulson and Lourd back and Joey Pollari, who plays uncle John Morse here, joining the cast. If you still want the earlier Monsters, Monster: The Ed Gein Story is the one to pair with this, if only to watch Hunnam go from killer to victim in under a year.
