Netflix’s Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story arrives Thursday, Sept. 17, with an imposing creative pedigree, a stacked cast and a premise built around one of America’s most mythologized alleged crimes. What it delivers, however, is a strained eight-hour attempt to turn Lizzie Borden’s story into a sweeping statement about womanhood, violence and legacy — without finding much that is persuasive beneath the bloodshed.
Created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, the latest entry in their Monster universe stars Ella Beatty as Lizzie, alongside Vicky Krieps, Charlie Hunnam, Rebecca Hall, Sarah Paulson, Jessica Barden, Joey Pollari and Billie Lourd. The series retells the Borden saga, best known to many through the playground chant whose melody becomes a recurring motif here, and also previously dramatized in the 2018 film Lizzie, starring Chloë Sevigny and Kristen Stewart.
The historical Borden denied responsibility for the August 1892 deaths of her father and stepmother. This Netflix version is not interested in ambiguity. From early on, The Lizzie Borden Story treats Lizzie as the person who picked up the axe, then sets about explaining why the show believes she did it.
That answer is bluntly drawn. Andrew and Abby, played by Hunnam and Hall, are presented as cruel figures whose chief function is to make Lizzie’s violence feel emotionally legible. They torment household help, belittle their daughter and are played with deliberately heightened nastiness. One dinner scene pushes the grotesquerie all the way to geysers of vomit. As motivation-building goes, it is hardly subtle, but the series clearly wants viewers aligned with Lizzie before the axe falls.
The premiere, directed by Max Winkler, also introduces Maggie, a new housemaid played by Krieps. Maggie immediately distinguishes herself through skill, work ethic and a wildly anachronistic look — including punk shags in Manic Panic shades that belong nowhere near the late 19th century. Lizzie is quickly drawn to her, and Maggie appears charmed in return. Under Maggie’s influence, Lizzie begins to push against the restrictions of her home life and eventually considers whether killing her parents might be her only escape.
That setup gives the series a clear path. The problem is that Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story still has eight hours to fill, and the show too often seems to run out of meaningful story before it runs out of runtime.
Some of that padding comes through repetition and slowed-down storytelling. Expository points are underlined more than once, including a character describing a completed project as “the culmination of my life’s ambitions” and then, minutes later, “everything I ever dreamed of.” Lizzie and Maggie are also given dreamy outdoor interludes that gesture toward historical lesbian dramas such as Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Ammonite, though without the same force or intensity. Potentially interesting threads, including a late effort to explain Abby more fully, are introduced only to be cut short.
The series’ larger gamble is its attempt to make Lizzie part of a broader chain of infamous female killers. That framing is meant to suggest something bigger about women, society and violence, but the connection is treated so loosely that the point becomes increasingly thin.
One strand reaches back to Elizabetta Báthory, the 16th-century countess accused of bathing in the blood of virgins. Lizzie and Maggie read her story to each other, while Krieps also appears as Elizabetta in flashbacks. The device allows for another conspicuously modern hairstyle — this time severe bangs with tomato-red streaks — but it does little to deepen either Elizabetta or Maggie.
The show also jumps forward to Aileen Wuornos, played by Paulson. In this telling, Aileen is captivated by Lizzie, to the point of booking an overnight stay at Lizzie’s former home and hallucinating interactions with her. The series devotes significant attention to Aileen, presenting her as a sex worker turned killer of johns who sees Lizzie as a role model, a kindred spirit and someone who understands how the pressures of womanhood can lead to violence.
That connective tissue is where The Lizzie Borden Story most visibly overreaches. Lizzie, Elizabetta and Aileen are grouped together because they are female killers, but the series does not establish meaningful common ground among their backgrounds, motives, methods or outcomes. Its attempt to recast Lizzie not only as an independent woman but also as an icon of the women’s suffrage movement feels unearned within the story presented.
The result is a show that wants its violence to signify more than shock value, yet struggles to articulate what that meaning actually is. It asks for sympathy for Lizzie while offering little complexity to Abby, despite positioning itself as attuned to the pressures placed on women. It makes Maggie central to Lizzie’s transformation, but leaves her own goals, desires and personality feeling unstable from one plot turn to the next.
By the final hour, Lizzie declares, “Okay. Let’s make it mean something.” The line is aimed at her wealth and notoriety, which she wants to transform into a force for good. It also captures the show’s central problem. Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story keeps insisting that its bloody legend has a grander purpose, but the argument never fully lands.
The bottom line: despite its high-profile cast and provocative subject, Netflix’s latest Monster chapter has plenty of killers and plenty of runtime, but not nearly enough substance to justify the mythmaking.