Warning: spoilers for Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story.
Ryan Murphy’s television work often begins with a strong premise before veering into increasingly frustrating territory. That tendency is especially visible in his anthology projects, where dramatic twists and sensational subject matter can overshadow the people and events being portrayed.
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story continues the Netflix anthology’s focus on notorious killers, with Ella Beatty playing Lizzie Borden. The series places Borden at the centre of a story about anger, oppression and violence, but its treatment of those ideas is undermined by a major problem: it reduces complex women and complicated motives to a simplistic image of female rage.
A notorious case becomes a fictionalised murder story
Lizzie Borden was tried and acquitted after her father, Andrew Borden, and stepmother, Abby Borden, were found dead in their home from multiple axe wounds. Charlie Hunnam plays Andrew, while Rebecca Hall portrays Abby.
The case became attached to the famous rhyme claiming that Lizzie “took an axe” and struck her mother 40 times before killing her father 41 times. Those numbers are not historically accurate, and Borden was found not guilty of the charges. The mystery surrounding the case has endured precisely because the available evidence never settled the question of what happened.
The series takes a much firmer position. Rather than preserving that uncertainty, Murphy and co-creator Ian Brennan present Borden as a killer. The show imagines her anger at the life imposed on her building until she and her lover and maid, Maggie, played by Vicky Krieps, kill Andrew and Abby as a means of escape. There is no confirmation that this happened.
Like Monster: The Ed Gein Story, the new season combines elements from its subject’s legacy with invented material. However, it goes further by bringing another notorious female killer into Borden’s story: Aileen Wuornos, played by Sarah Paulson.
Where the series loses its argument
Wuornos is presented as being fascinated by Borden and the anger attributed to her. In the show, that connection becomes a central explanation for Wuornos’s crimes. She discusses Borden’s rage with her girlfriend Shelby, a fictionalised version of Tyria Moore played by Jessie Lee.
The choice creates a strained thematic link between two very different cases. Borden’s guilt remains historically unresolved, while Wuornos’s life and crimes have been discussed through the context of prolonged sexual abuse and exploitation. The series does not give enough attention to that history. Instead, it suggests that Wuornos’s violence grew from an almost abstract admiration for Borden.
The show depicts one man attacking Wuornos while she was working as a sex worker, but that isolated incident cannot carry the weight of the broader history the character requires. The result is a reductive pairing: one angry woman who kills her family and another woman who becomes obsessed with her.
Female rage is not simply a loss of control
The season’s central idea could have been valuable. Women’s anger can emerge from sustained abuse, coercion, confinement and injustice, rather than from a sudden inability to control themselves. Lizzie’s frustration is often convincing, and the performances communicate the pressure surrounding both women.
Unfortunately, the writing flattens that complexity. Brennan is credited as the sole writer, and Max Winkler directed most of the season. Sarah Adina Smith directed two episodes and appears to be the only woman among the principal creative figures identified in the source material. That imbalance is notable in a series attempting to define female rage.
Paulson and Beatty bring conviction to material that does not consistently understand its own argument. The performances make the characters’ pain feel real, but the script repeatedly turns that pain into a broad explanation for murder. The Wuornos-Borden connection then becomes less an exploration of history than a device designed to make the season’s theme explicit.
The earlier Gein season used films such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Psycho, both inspired in part by the Gein case, to examine how a real criminal shaped popular culture. Lizzie Borden attempts a comparable conversation about legacy, but its treatment of Wuornos comes across as though she simply wanted to kill men because Borden had killed people.
A missed opportunity for the anthology
This is the first season of the Monster anthology to focus on female leads, making its shallow approach particularly disappointing. The Borden case already contains an unresolved mystery, while Wuornos’s life offers difficult questions about abuse, survival, exploitation and responsibility.
Rather than investigate those tensions, the season turns both women into symbols. It insists that their stories are about rage while overlooking the different circumstances, histories and moral questions that separate them. That is why the show’s central idea never becomes a serious examination of female anger.
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Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story has compelling performers and a subject filled with genuine uncertainty. Its biggest failure is that it replaces that uncertainty with a simplistic story about women becoming violent when their anger overflows.
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