Ryan Murphy Finally Picked a Victim Nobody Can Sue Over
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story was released on Netflix on Thursday 17 September 2026, all eight episodes at once. It is the fourth season of the anthology created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, and the first to be built around a woman.
Ella Beatty plays Lizzie Borden. Charlie Hunnam — who played Ed Gein in the previous season — is her father, Andrew. Rebecca Hall is her stepmother, Abby. Vicky Krieps plays the family’s maid, Bridget Sullivan. Billie Lourd, Jessica Barden and Joey Pollari fill out the household, and Sarah Paulson appears as Aileen Wuornos, which is not subtle about where the fifth season is going.
Netflix’s own logline describes a repressed daughter and a rebellious maid trapped in a house built on humiliation and cruelty, escaping into a shared fantasy of sex, power and revenge. Vanity Fair summarised the approach as Ryan Murphy doing Cinderella, in blood.
The reviews will argue about whether that is defensible. The more interesting question is why, after three seasons of escalating real-world trouble, the franchise reached back 134 years for its subject.
Look at the sequence and the answer is fairly plain.
Season one: Dahmer, 2022
Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story was released on 21 September 2022 with Evan Peters in the lead. It was an enormous commercial success and a reputational problem from the first week.
Relatives of Dahmer’s victims said publicly that Netflix had not contacted them and that watching their family members’ deaths dramatised was retraumatising. The murders had happened between 1978 and 1991. The people in the story were not historical figures. They had surviving parents, siblings and children, and those people were alive to say so.
Season two: the Menéndez brothers, 2024
Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menéndez Story went further into the problem, because the subjects themselves were alive and incarcerated.
Erik Menéndez publicly condemned the portrayal. The season arrived in the middle of a renewed legal and public campaign around the brothers’ case. Whatever one thinks of the merits of that campaign, a dramatisation of living men, produced without their participation, while their convictions were being actively re-litigated, is a category of risk that no historical subject carries.
Season three: Ed Gein, 2025
Monster: The Ed Gein Story moved back in time — the murders were in the 1950s — and the consent problem shrank accordingly.
The critical problem did not. The season holds a 22% score on Rotten Tomatoes, the lowest in the franchise, against an overall series score of 42%. Collider’s Therese Lacson titled her review with the plea: “It’s 2025, Ryan Murphy, Please Stop Making These Serial Killer Sob Stories.”
That is the accumulated position going into this year: a format criticised for extracting sympathy for men who murdered people, repeatedly opposed by the families of those people, and now also failing with critics.
Season four: 1892
Andrew and Abby Borden were killed at their home in Fall River, Massachusetts, in August 1892. Lizzie Borden was 32. She was tried and acquitted in June 1893. She died in 1927. No one was ever convicted.
Every problem the first three seasons created is structurally absent here.
There are no grieving families. The victims died 134 years ago. Nobody alive knew them.
There is no living subject to object. Borden died a century ago.
There is no ongoing legal proceeding to interfere with. The case is closed and has been since the nineteenth century.
And there is a fourth advantage that is more useful to a dramatist than the other three combined: because Borden was acquitted, nothing about what happened in that house is established fact. A writer dramatising Dahmer is constrained by a confession and a conviction. A writer dramatising Borden is constrained by almost nothing. The invented relationship with the maid, the interior life, the motive — none of it can be contradicted, because none of it was ever proven either way.
Beatty has been explicit that the season is an argument rather than a reconstruction. She told Netflix’s own Tudum that she “felt incredibly lucky to be the first woman monster,” and described the project as an attempt to understand why women kill and whether killers are born or made.
That is a thesis. It is only available because the record is empty enough to hold one.
What this tells you about the franchise’s condition
Murphy has had an uneven 2026. All’s Fair holds a 6% Rotten Tomatoes score. The Beauty was effectively finished after a single season. Love Story was warmly received and turned Sarah Pidgeon and Paul Anthony Kelly into names. The Shards divided critics.
Monster is the most reliable asset in that portfolio, and it has been sustaining damage in a specific way — not to its viewing figures, which remain strong, but to its licence to keep operating. Each season has made the next one harder to defend.
Moving to the nineteenth century does not answer the criticism. It removes the people who were making it.
Whether that reads as tact or as evasion is a judgment each viewer will make. But the Wuornos casting at the end of this season suggests the retreat is temporary. Aileen Wuornos was executed in 2002. She has surviving relatives, surviving associates, and a documented case file, and a season about her would put the franchise straight back into exactly the territory this one carefully avoids.
Lizzie Borden, in that reading, is not a change of direction. She is a pause.
Sources
- Netflix Tudum, 17 September 2026 — the cast guide, Ella Beatty’s remarks, and the season’s framing of Borden’s confinement
- Deadline, 4 August 2026 — the release date, first-look images, and the confirmation that Borden is the franchise’s first female subject
- HollywoodLife, August 2026 — the eight-episode simultaneous release, the full cast, the Netflix logline, and the release history of the first three seasons
- Collider, 13 September 2026 — the 42% franchise Rotten Tomatoes score, the 22% score for the Ed Gein season, Therese Lacson’s review title, Sarah Paulson’s Wuornos casting, and Murphy’s 2026 slate
- Vanity Fair, 4 August 2026 — the description of the season’s tone
- El-Balad, 17 September 2026 — Borden’s age at the time of the 1892 killings and the June 1893 acquittal
- Wikipedia — the September 2022 release of the Dahmer season and the anthology’s production credits
