Waking up to live another day in fear of being raped, tortured, and beaten by their own father.
Their own mother, indifferent to their pain, chose to back her demented husband rather than her children.
Lyle and Erik Menendez, who became widely known simply as ‘The Menendez Brothers,’ were stuck in this dark mess of a family.
They saw only one way out… killing their parents before their parents got them first.
The infamous Menendez Brothers case took place in the ‘90s as one of the first televised court trials that aired in 1993.
During this trial, the Menendez Brothers were accused of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder of their parents, Jose and Mary Louise “Kitty” Menendez, who were claimed to have sexually molested and assaulted their sons from as young as the age of six.
This case shook America as one of the first publicized instances of male sexual abuse and rape.
Almost 30 years later, Director Ryan Murphy, known for his involvement in critically acclaimed American Horror Story and precursor Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, produced the second season of the anthology series titled Monster: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, depicting the stories of what ‘truly’ happened with the case of the Menendez Brothers.
This series is a cinematic masterpiece that will pull on every single heartstring in your body.
Even if you know this case like the back of your hand, suspense leaves you on the edge of your seat every second of each episode.
Breakout stars Nicholas Chavez and Cooper Koch, who played Lyle and Erik Menendez respectfully, had performances that will likely garner Emmy attention in 2025.
Notably, in Episode Five, titled “The Hurt Man”, Koch and his on-screen attorney, Leslie Abramson (played by Ari Graynor), performed a 33-minute episode with no cuts nor edits, detailing the gruesome molestation that Erik Menendez experienced from his father and kept secret for over 12 years.
Although the acting was breathtaking and deserving of critical-acclaim, my criticism for the project is saved for Murphy and the writers.
As addicting as the season is, it has an extremely humiliating plotline filled with countless fallacious holes.
Lyle Menendez is mischaracterized as an arrogant, spoiled, rich kid who’s a psychopath alongside his brother Erik.
From the get-go, he was portrayed as a tightly-wound, pathological liar who felt no actual remorse for his crimes.
On multiple occasions, he was shown mocking his parents’ funeral with fake tears and a flippant selection of funeral music as well as being vain enough to only care about his looks while being on trial for the death penalty.
This portrayal was wildly inaccurate according to his brother Erik, who has responded to the show’s success via Twitter, saying, “I believed we had moved beyond the lies and ruinous character portrayals of Lyle, creating a caricature of Lyle rooted in horrible and blatant lies rampant in the show.”
Murphy made the character widely exaggerated and not-at-all accurate to what Lyle is really like.
With the release of this series, a whole new generation is learning about this trial and is being fed a false narrative behind it.
The show is single-handedly pushing back 30 years of progress that the Menendez Brothers have worked for to clear their names.
By the end of the series, it was clear Murphy had sympathy for the Menendez parents and wrote the season to paint them as the victims rather than the young boys.
Throughout the show, several different renditions of events surrounding the murder were shown to symbolize how we will never actually know what happened.
In the last scene of the show, it reminisces back to the day prior to the boys killing their parents.
The boys’ interpretation was shown as a flashback during the trial scenes in which their parents were acting strange and made the boys believe they were planning to kill them on that trip.
The last scene of the show repeated the same flashback, only this time showing the parents as innocently enjoying their boat ride while the boys acted like spoiled brats.
It’s very harmful to portray a show as biographical but show obvious bias towards one side.
Even after everything articulated throughout the series, Murphy still ends it on the note that the parents were the victims by portraying them as innocent and making the boys look like psychopaths.
The final line of the show is Koch saying, “Lets f***ing do it,” in reference to murder their parents the next day, even though during their testimony, they claimed the murder was done sporadically in self-defense the night of.
As the series added up to over nine hours long and detailed every point to a tee, it’s an interesting coincidence that Murphy chose to not include new evidence discovered since the 1993 trial, including new alleged evidence that Roy Rosselló, a member of the ‘90s Latino boy band Menuedo was also drugged and raped by Jose Menendez when he was just fourteen years old, proving the possibility that Jose Menendez was a child molester.
But, maybe the worst of it all was the fact that Murphy leaned into the sickening storyline claiming that Lyle and Erik were in an incestual relationship, depicting them with oddly sexual tension, even including a jump scene in which the two brothers were caught showering together by their mother.
This theory has been disproved on multiple occasions, but Murphy still chose to include such embarrassing and uncomfortable scenes for not only the Brothers but the audience as well.
It is such an embarrassment to the brothers to the point that they have gone online and urged people to boycott the show and lower its ratings due to the misinformation it is spreading.
As much as the acting and cinematography that was shown in this series were outstanding, I would suggest exiting Netflix and watching the trial recordings yourself if you want to know what exactly happened without any of Murphy’s misconstrued storylines.
Monster: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story is streaming exclusively on Netflix.