There’s something in the air. Two of the year’s most intriguing shows—Netflix’s Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story and Prime Video’s Cruel Intentions, have major incest plotlines. It’s not every TV season you get a single show dealing with such a heavy forbidden topic, let alone two.
There’s a reason people are drawn to things like true crime—it’s fascinating to see the circumstances that lead someone to commit a shocking crime. In the comfort of your own home, you can see people doing things you couldn’t imagine, and would never dream of doing yourself. That same idea applies to all kinds of taboos—illegal or not. And both Monsters and Cruel Intentions offer up the promise of examining one of the most taboo taboos: incest. Unfortunately, they both handle it terribly.
Minor spoilers for Monsters and major spoilers for Cruel Intentions ahead!
Incest is admittedly shocking, yet there’s arguably value in portraying and attempting to understand such a deeply forbidden element of society. What could lead someone to be attracted to their sibling, let alone drive them to act on those desires? Yet neither show is interested in incest beyond its base shock value.
Netflix’s Monsters handles incest relatively subtly—though that didn’t stop the controversy from pouring in. In Episode 2, “Spree,” Lyle Menendez (Nicholas Alexander Chavez) holds his brother Erik’s (Cooper Koch) neck before kissing him intensely. Homoeroticism abounds throughout the show—a Ryan Murphy specialty—and the original teaser and marketing play up the sexual element of the brothers’ relationship. The problem is: There’s no evidence of a sexual relationship between the Menendez brothers.
Murphy’s show implies that part of the reason the Menendez brothers killed their parents was to hide the fact that they were secretly in love with one another. That’s a big claim to make when there is no evidence, and looks especially bad when Monsters is largely about how the brothers experienced unimaginable sexual abuse at the hands of their father. Monsters' sheepish peppering of incest turns a haunting story into an embarrassing, cringe-inducing fan fiction.
Incest is a major motivation for the characters of Cruel Intentions. Step-siblings Caroline (Sarah Catherine Hook) and Lucien (Zac Burgess) create a scheme: If Lucien can successfully seduce the vice president’s daughter Annie (Savannah Lee Smith), Caroline will give Lucien the one thing he wants more than anything in the world: the opportunity to have sex with her. And yes, once again, Caroline and Lucien are step-siblings.
This might catch you by surprise, especially if you haven’t seen the 1999 Cruel Intentions film that the series is based on, which features a similarly incestuous plotline. While step-siblings aren’t biologically related—and therefore a sexual relationship isn’t illegal—we could probably all agree it’s concerning. Why on earth would these siblings want to have sex with each other, you undoubtedly ask. This could make for a fascinating exploration of characters’ psyche, but the TV series never gets any more introspective than the very plain reason that they desire each other because they’re conventionally attractive.
Cruel Intentions does not attempt to look within Caroline and Lucien to explore the why behind their mutual lust for one another. Both characters are frustratingly obtuse. They have a complicated relationship with their stepmother, and they’re both snarky and popular, which pretty much covers the entirety of their character description. The incest is all emptiness and plot mechanics; it looks like Lucien’s desire is one-sided until the end of Episode 5, where Caroline is seen masturbating over Lucien’s sex tapes. The reveal that Caroline wants to sleep with Lucien as much as he wants her—if not even more so—doesn’t help us understand anything about Caroline, and it functions like little more than an inexplicable plot twist.
Things get considerably more unhinged when Lucien ultimately rejects Caroline’s offer, saying he’s developed feelings for Annie, who he was supposed to seduce and destroy. This sends Caroline on a downward spiral, which in turn leads Lucien to do something even more unthinkable than having sex with Caroline—he has sex with his stepmother instead. This feels like it should be a hugely impactful moment—a boy just slept with his mother figure!—but it comes across as asinine and frustratingly hollow. Cruel Intentions only cares about incest to create shock and awe and has no interest in why either Lucien or his mother would do something so life-altering.
Exploring something as taboo as incest takes a creative team that is both willing to take risks and has a genuine interest in examining how such desires manifest and what could lead a person to do something so completely against what society deems as acceptable. Sensitive topics demand just that: sensitivity. Unfortunately, neither Monsters nor Cruel Intentions have any desire to understand incest—it only seeks to use it as window dressing, baiting audiences into cheap shock value and titillation.
