Ryan Murphy’s Latest Era of Cynical Hits

Ryan Murphy’s true-crime series seldom drop without a splash. Shows like “American Crime Story” and “Monster” have their own gravitational pull, and so their revisionism matters. “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” is no exception: it recently débuted on Netflix at the top of the streamer’s most-watched list, and has become this century’s highest-profile revisit of the 1989 murder of Jose and Kitty Menendez by their young-adult sons. Critics have savaged Murphy and his co-showrunner Ian Brennan for their tabloid-y treatment of the tragic saga, and Murphy became embroiled in a very public tit-for-tat with the Menendez family, whose condemnation of the series as a “grotesque shockadrama” was followed by Murphy’s bombastic declaration that his retelling is “the best thing that has happened to the Menendez brothers in thirty years.”