There’s a particular brand of creative exhaustion that settles over Hollywood like smog, and you can always tell when it’s at its thickest by counting how many times the industry returns to the same corpses. Now we’re getting Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, the fourth season of Ryan Murphy‘s Netflix anthology, ostensibly centered on that most Victorian of American murder mysteries—the 1892 axe killings in Fall River, Massachusetts. But the first set photos to generate real buzz aren’t of Ella Beatty as the infamous Lizzie; they’re of Sarah Paulson, rendered nearly unrecognizable as Aileen Wuornos, the Florida highway prostitute who killed seven men between 1989 and 1990. And looking at those images, all I can think is: Why are we doing this again?
This is Murphy’s method now—the killer cameo, the murderer’s supporting role, the thematic rhyme that justifies cramming multiple monsters into a single season. We saw it with Ted Bundy appearing in previous installments like some kind of homicidal Hitchcock signature. Now Wuornos will apparently haunt the margins of a story set nearly a century before her birth, presumably as part of some meditation on female violence, on women who kill, on the American fascination with both. One can already imagine the montage: Lizzie with her axe, Aileen with her pistol, the suggestion that history repeats itself in blood.
The central Borden story boasts a genuinely impressive cast. Charlie Hunnam as Andrew Borden, the tight-fisted patriarch who was found on his sofa with his skull caved in. Rebecca Hall as Abby Borden, the stepmother discovered upstairs in similar condition. Billie Lourd as Emma, the older sister who provided Lizzie’s alibi. Vicky Krieps as Bridget Sullivan, the Irish maid whose testimony might have said more than it did. These are serious actors, and the Borden case—never solved, eternally debated—offers genuine dramatic potential. The question of whether Lizzie did it, and what drove her if she did, has fueled scholarship and speculation for over a century. There’s a real story here, one that hasn’t been definitively told on screen.
But Murphy can’t resist gilding his lilies, and so we get Paulson’s Wuornos thrown into the mix. The photographs from the Los Angeles set show her looking appropriately transformed—the stringy hair, the tired eyes, the general aura of a woman who has been abandoned by every institution that might have saved her. It’s impressive makeup work in service of what, exactly? We already have a definitive Wuornos. Patty Jenkins made Monster in 2003, and Charlize Theron gave a performance so viscerally committed that the Academy couldn’t ignore it. Theron didn’t just play Wuornos—she seemed to metabolize her, gaining weight and submitting to prosthetics that obliterated her movie-star beauty in service of something rawer and more troubling than the typical true-crime fare.
What new understanding is a supporting role in a Lizzie Borden series going to provide about Aileen Wuornos? The answer, of course, is none. This isn’t about understanding. It’s about brand extension. Monster is now a franchise, and franchises require recognizable elements in each installment. Having worked through Dahmer, the Menendez Brothers, and Ed Gein, Murphy has established a formula: take a famous killer, cast talented actors, add explicit recreations of violence, season with pop psychology, serve across eight to ten hours. The inclusion of Wuornos in a Borden story suggests the formula is evolving—now we get killer crossovers, murder as shared universe.
Murphy has a particular gift that shouldn’t be dismissed: he can make you watch. His shows have the quality of highway accidents—you know you shouldn’t look, but something in the human constitution compels your attention. He understands pacing, he understands cliffhangers, he understands how to deploy attractive young actors in increasingly compromising situations. What he doesn’t understand, or perhaps doesn’t care to understand, is the difference between documentation and exploitation, between illumination and titillation.
The fundamental problem with Murphy’s true-crime productions is that they treat real murders like content. The victims become props in someone else’s Emmy campaign. Their deaths become opportunities for actors to demonstrate range and for viewers to experience something that feels dangerous from the safety of their couches. There’s a transactional coldness at the heart of it all, dressed up in the language of psychological complexity and social commentary. Murphy will tell you he’s exploring how society creates monsters, how institutions fail, how trauma perpetuates itself. What he’s actually doing is staging murder as entertainment and calling it education.
The families of Dahmer’s victims spoke out about that Netflix series, expressing their exhaustion and retraumatization at seeing their loved ones’ deaths dramatized yet again. The Ed Gein season apparently tested the patience of even Murphy’s most devoted viewers—audiences report abandoning it after two or three episodes, which for a Murphy production is practically a revolt. And yet the machine grinds on, because the machine must be fed.
Sarah Paulson is, without question, a talented actress. Her work in The People v. O.J. Simpson demonstrated a capacity for inhabiting real figures with intelligence and restraint. Her various American Horror Story performances have shown range and commitment. But there’s something troubling about watching her career become so thoroughly entangled with Murphy’s assembly line. She has the ability to do almost anything; why does she keep doing this? One viewer online wondered, with dark humor, what Murphy might be holding over her. It’s a joke, but jokes can carry truth: the gravitational pull of steady employment in prestige television is not nothing, and Murphy has made himself the center of a small solar system of recurring collaborators.
Paulson will no doubt deliver a performance of considerable intensity. She’ll probably be nominated for things. Critics will praise her willingness to “go there.” But what does Wuornos add to Lizzie Borden’s story beyond the implication that female killers exist across time, that axes and pistols are just different tools for the same dark work? It feels less like thematic depth than thematic padding—a way to justify the anthology format by suggesting connections that may not actually illuminate anything.
The Borden case, at least, has genuine mystery. No one was ever convicted. The evidence was circumstantial. The questions of motive—inheritance, resentment, something darker in that claustrophobic Victorian household—remain genuinely unresolved. There’s material here for a serious examination of class, gender, family, and the ways American society both protected and constrained women in the Gilded Age. Whether Murphy will engage with any of this substantively, or whether the Borden murders will simply become another vehicle for stylized violence and actorly transformation, remains to be seen.
What gets lost in this endless recycling is any sense of responsibility to the dead. Andrew and Abby Borden, the seven men Wuornos killed—they weren’t plot points but people whose deaths caused immeasurable grief. The documentaries and Jenkins’ film at least grappled with this reality, however imperfectly. Murphy’s productions tend to treat victims as necessary ingredients in the killer’s story, subordinate characters whose primary narrative function is to die interestingly.
Maybe Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story will prove me wrong. Maybe it will find something new and essential in this material, some insight that justifies the expense and spectacle. But the track record doesn’t inspire confidence. What Murphy has demonstrated across his prolific career is a consistent preference for style over substance, for provocation over inquiry, for the appearance of seriousness rather than the thing itself.
The saddest part is that none of this will slow down the machine. The season will arrive on Netflix sometime in 2026. It will be watched by millions. Paulson will be praised for her transformation. Awards will be distributed. And somewhere, another writer’s room is already planning the next installment, flipping through murder cases like trading cards, looking for the next story that’s already been told, the next monster to add to the collection.
