Netflix's No. 1 Show Right Now Is Kicking up Controversy

'Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story' is Netflix's top global television show right now.

By Stephen Andrew

Netflix's top show right now is Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, and it's kicking up some controversy. The series — which FlixPatrol cites as Netflix's number one show in the world right — follows the crimes and trials of Lyle and Erik Menendez, who were convicted in 1996 of killing their parents and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

Now, Erik Menendez has spoken out against Monsters and slammed it for being full of "blatant lies" about him and his brother. "I believed we had moved beyond the lies and ruinous character portrayals of Lyle, creating a caricature of Lyle rooted in horrible and blatant lies rampant in the show," Menendez wrote in a statment, as reported by CNN. "It is with a heavy heart that I say, I believe Ryan Murphy cannot be this naive and inaccurate about the facts of our lives so as to do this without bad intent."

The second season of Monster follows the story of the Menendez brothers — portrayed by Cooper Koch and Nicholas Chavez — from multiple perspectives, and includes innuendos of incest and murder motive that the younger Menendez brother claims are not accurate. 

"It is sad for me to know that Netflix's dishonest portrayal of the tragedies surrounding our crime have taken the painful truths several steps backward – back through time to an era when the prosecution built a narrative on a belief system that males were not sexually abused, and that males experienced rape trauma differently than women," Menendez wrote. "Is the truth not enough? Let the truth stand as the truth. How demoralizing is it to know that one man with power can undermine decades of progress in shedding light on childhood trauma."

In response to Menendez's statement, Monsters creator Ryan Murphy came to the defense of the series, which he says the brothers haven't even seen. "I think it's interesting that he's issued a statement without having seen the show," Murphy said in an interview with Entertainment Tonight, then adding, "It's really, really hard — if it's your life — to see your life up on screen."

"The thing that I find interesting that he doesn't mention in his quote, is if you watch the show, I would say 60 to 65 percent of our show in the scripts and in the film form center around the abuse and what they claim happened to them," Murphy continued. "And we do it very carefully and we give them their day in court and they talk openly about it."

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The famed TV producer went on to note that he's aware exploring sexual abuse in a television series "can be controversial," adding, "It's a 'Rashomon' kind of approach, where there were 4 people involved in that. Two of them are dead. What about the parents? We had an obligation as storytellers to also try and put in their perspective based on our research, which we did."

Murphy was also asked about the show's depictions of a "romantic relationship" between the Menendez brothers, and he clarified that this was merely something done in order to best capture multiple perspectives and claims surrounding the pair. "If you watch the show, what the show is doing is presenting the points of view and theories from so many people who were involved in the case," he said, then adding that Dominick Dunne — a Vanity Fair journalist portrayed by Nathan Lane in the show — "wrote several articles talking about that theory" and Monsters is just "presenting his point of view. And we had an obligation to show all of that and we did."

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