The first teaser for the new Ryan Murphy series Monsters: The Lyle and Eric Menendez Story didn’t so much raise an eyebrow as catapult an eyebrow off my forehead to the moon.
In it, the camera sensually pans around the actors playing the notorious brothers as they, shirtless, start caressing each other. I’m sorry, you think. Are they suggesting that these brothers were banging?!?!
Monsters, which tells the story about the siblings who were convicted of murdering their parents, is now out on Netflix. And, well, yes, that is exactly what the trailer was suggesting—which the show itself stops just short of making explicit.
Within the short time that the series has been out, the allegation of sibling incest has already sparked a backlash against the show.
In his review of the series, my Daily Beast’s Obsessed colleague Nick Schager explained that Monsters insinuates that one of the motives the Menendez Brothers had for killing their parents was to disguise their incestuous relationship.
Nicholas Chavez as Lyle Menendez and Cooper Koch as Erik Menendez
Miles Crist/NetflixThe series introduces the idea “that Lyle and Erik committed parricide not in response to trauma but because they were terrified that José might learn that they were lovers,” Schager wrote. “Having already implied this in a shot of them reveling face-to-face at a party, Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story depicts it outright in a quick scene in which [their mother] Kitty accidentally walks in on them together in the shower, lasciviously soaping each other up.”
Homoerotic clips from the series have started circulating on social media, offending a vocal group of posters.
“Lyle admitted on the stand that he molested Erik when they were children just to show him what their own father was doing to him,” one X poster wrote. “To act as if they were in a incest relationship when they were older is revolting. It ain’t a fanfic it’s peoples trauma.”
“Taking a story about two brothers who suffered from sexual abuse from their dad and turning it into an incestuous fantasy is horrid,” wrote another. There are scores of similar, disgusted reactions.
Currently, Monsters has a score of 54 on Metacritic. The first installment of Murphy’s Monster anthology series, about serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, received a similar polarized reception. It was a huge hit for Netflix, and won several Emmy Awards, but also faced criticism from the families of Dahmer’s victims, who were dismayed to see their experiences sensationalized for entertainment.
Monsters is already the Number 1 series on Netflix’s Top 10.
