Netflix has a new no.1 show in its charts – one that wasn’t too hard to see coming. Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story is out now and has immediately become really popular for the streamer, all around the world.
It tells the real-life story of two brothers who murdered their parents, despite what looked from the outside like a privileged and easy life with riches at their disposal. At trial, they alleged terrible abuse from their mother and father, complicating matters.
The show isn’t just a hit, though – it’s also generating a lot of conversation. In particular, those who are a bit more familiar with the trial and its story (since much of the trial footage is publicly available) are aghast at how Monsters represents the two young men.
Glance at user reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and you’ll quickly find a bunch of people who think that things should have been handled better. One such user wrote: “They did not portray the true story, making them seem like they’re the real villains. Leaving out the trauma they had actually gone through.”
Another was similarly upset: “This mischaracterisation and exaggeration of this event with sprinkled-in truths, is wrong, morally. Unlike Dahmer these young men are still alive and are very much unequivocally victims.”
If you thought Netflix would most likely ignore that sort of noise, though, it appears to have almost predicted it. After all, it just took the wraps off a documentary called The Menendez Brothers with a first trailer:
The documentary will feature extensive phone interviews with the brothers themselves, from jail, to explain why they did what they did, and to perhaps contextualise the creative choices made in Monsters.
That said, we don’t have any indication that Netflix made the two productions in concert, or that one fed into the other, beyond the clever timing of having The Menendez Brothers come out so soon after the dramatisation – it’ll start streaming on 7 October.
All of this underlines that Netflix is probably the best streaming service out there right now for true crime fans – we can’t think of any others that would have a documentary to accompany a series like this, after all.
