‘Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menéndez Story’ Series Premiere Recap: Blood Brothers

He’s an American psycho. That’s what Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menéndez story wants you to believe about at least one of the show’s eponymous brothers. When we’re introduced to Lyle (Nicholas Alexander Chavez) in the opening moments of new true-crime drama from Dahmer co-creators Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, he’s an aggressive, over-smiling, coked-up yuppie freak, with the same affected mannerisms Christian Bale borrowed from Tom Cruise when playing Patrick Bateman. Later in the episode Lyle dresses up as Cruise in Cocktail for Halloween, outraged that elementary-school kids don’t recognize this “fuckin’ iconic” look. He even has a favorite glossy pop act, though it’s Milli Vanilli rather than Huey Lewis and the News. Yep, we think, especially when we contrast him with his obviously guilt- and grief-stricken baby brother Erik (Cooper Koch). We’ve seen this kind of scumbag before. 

Then, much later in the episode but earlier in time, his mother does this to him.

Painfully tearing the college-aged young man’s hair replacement right off his scalp, exposing a secret he’d carefully kept from the younger brother who idolizes him, thinking absolutely nothing of paying her son back for disagreeing with her by humiliating him: That’s how Kitty Menéndez (Chloë Sevigny) treats her son Erik. And she’s the nice parent, the one they killed “to put her out of her misery.” What kind of monster must that have made their father, José (Javier Bardem) — the one they really wanted to kill?

As Murphy has done across his career-highlight work in the true crime genre, both in the three American Crime Story seasons and Monsters’ forerunner Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, he hides his hand somewhat at first. We see José behave in a monstrously emotionally abusive fashion. Nothing his sons do is ever good enough, from making national tennis tournaments to getting into Princeton. That perfectionist mentality is probably what led Lyle to get suspended from the school for plagiarism; if you can’t do it exactly right, why bother doing it yourself at all?

He’s prone to screaming in his sons’ faces, at the top of his lungs, on the tennis court. Mocking them, ridiculing them in public. Launching a full dinner plate at the wall when they can’t name all 50 state capitals. Erik spends the entire episode, both before and after the murders, in something close to Great War shellshock. Living with that man must have been like getting bombarded out in the middle of no man’s land. 

But there’s more. It doesn’t take a genius to guess what it is, either. Erik nearly says what it is to his therapist, Dr. Jerry Oziel (Dallas Roberts) recalling a time he’d told his horrified brother Lyle, after which the murder plot began. (Well, after that and a viewing of The Billionaire Boys’ Club, which gave them the idea to add to the resolve.) But instead he says, lamely, he simply had told Erik he loved him or something. 

If the therapist seems like he’s missing the obvious, there may be reason for that: He’s distracted because he’s a Curb Your Enthusiasm storyline dropped into a crime show. When Erik confesses, he tells him to have Lyle come down to the office too so they can all discuss it together — then excuses himself for coffee and sprints to a payphone to call his mistress and ask her to come and wait in the lobby to serve as a witness so the brothers won’t kill him.

Monsters has two chief weapons in its arsenal. The first is its suite of actors — Javier Bardem and Chloë Sevigny as the terrifying José and Kitty, Dallas Roberts as the nebbishy Dr. Oziel, Nicholas Alexander Chavez as the manic and obviously badly damaged Lyle, and especially Cooper Koch as Erik. Koch spends the entire episode on what feels like the verge not just of tears, but a full-fledged nervous breakdown. He holds his face drum taut, his eyes gush water seemingly involuntarily, he trembles as he talks, when he finally gets his confession out it comes in one quick gasp that compresses the words together. It’s his role to offset the American psychoness of Chavez’s Lyle — to be their bleeding heart, even as Lyle’s scheming mind whisks them from one failed attempt at creating an alibi to the next. Koch has to present us with the other side of the brothers; that’s a vital job, and he nails it.

Monsters’ other weapon is a familiar one in Murphy’s arsenal: excess. In the American Crime Story and Monster/s anthologies — all five seasons of which have focused on crimes that communicate some core, dark American values amid a 1990s media circus — he seems to have found the balance that has largely eluded him elsewhere. Monsters judiciously deploys moments of camp (Lyle making them play “Girl I’m Gonna Miss You” in his mother’s honor at the memorial service; the homoeroticism of the brothers’ relationship) and horror-violence (the hideous massacre of the parents, each of whom took multiple shots, and in Kitty’s case multiple minutes, before dying; Erik’s harrowing dreams of suicide, puling the trigger in which is the only way he can actually sleep) instead of just slathering them all across the screen. 

Not that this will benefit Murphy and Brennan that much, I don’t think. People’s verdict on Murphy is kind of in already, regardless of the caliber of work he puts out. I suspect this is why Netflix didn’t make screeners available to critics in advance; the outraged reaction to Dahmer in particular, largely by people who didn’t watch it, was like a charming throwback to the puritanical “Has the media gone too far????” morality debates of the 1990s. Fitting, given Murphy’s fave time period to explore! But still, unfortunate. Monsters didn’t knock me flat — the uninspired orange-heavy color palette is always gonna cost you some points, despite director Carl Franklin’s proficiency with performance and montage — but it did hit me, and hard.

If you or someone you know needs to reach out about sexual abuse or assault, RAINN is available 24/7 at 800-656-HOPE (4673), or online at RAINN.org.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.