Image Credit: ‘Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menéndez Story,’ Netflix

This fall, TV über-producer Ryan Murphy returns to Netflix with a new season of his true-crime series Monster—and it’s already proving to be just as controversial as the first.

The excessively titled DAHMER — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story premiered in September 2022 and pretty immediately had people talking. A harrowing account of the notorious serial killer (played by Evan Peters), the series attempted to contextualize Dahmer’s life and crimes by centering the stories of his victims and their loved ones, who were largely queer men and people of color.

While many viewers felt Monster was needlessly exploitative of these stories, and only contributed to pop culture’s glamorization of a killer (eBay even had to ban costumes of Dahmer from being sold!), the show was a massive hit for the streamer, becoming their third most-watched English-language original of all time.

Naturally, Netflix and Murphy were going to have to come back for more!

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The upcoming season two, Monsters: The Lyle And Erik Menéndez Story (streamlining the title just a bit), will shift its focus to the Menéndez Brothers, whose murder of their parents while they were 21 and 18, respectively, shocked the nation and whose trials in the ’90s became a media sensation.

Though Lyle and Erik were both found guilty and sentenced to life in prison in 1996, they maintained they were acting in self-defense, claiming to be lifelong victims of sexual abuse at the hands of their father, which their mother eventually became aware of but refused to do anything about.

In other words, it’s a highly analyzed, highly controversial case that treads into some sensitive moral grey areas… so of course Murphy is diving in head first!

It’s not entirely clear how Monsters will tackle the material, or if it will ultimately present the brothers’ actions more sympathetically, but we do know it’s going to be another splashy, star-studded affair for Murphy and company.

A number of the prolific producer’s regulars are among the ensemble, including Nathan Lane (American Crime Story: The People vs. O. J. Simpson) as a Vanity Fair reporter who covered the trial, Leslie Grossman (Popular) as a woman with an unlikely role in the brothers’ arrests, and Chloë Sevigny (Feud: Capote Vs. The Swans) as their mother, Kitty Menéndez.

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The series will also mark a rare television role for Oscar-winner Javier Bardem as their father, José Mendendez. But at the center of it all are two rising actors who are sure to make quite an impression as the infamous brothers: Nicholas Chavez (General Hospital, Murphy’s upcoming Grotesquerie) will star as the elder Lyle, while out actor Cooper Koch (Swallowed, They/Them) will ply Erik.

An eerie date announcement for Monsters (seen above) offered a brief glimpse of Lyle and Erik on the night of the crime, but a new teaser this week showcases the family’s dark dynamic, while hinting at an element we did not see coming—though we probably should have:

Wait a minute, is Monsters: The Lyle And Erik Menéndez Story going to portray the brothers’ relationship as homoerotic?

Staged like a family portrait, the unsettling clip sees the cast smiling to the camera (Chavez’s Lyle on the left, Koch’s Erik on the right) as we hear Sevigny’s Kitty and Bardem’s José argue in voiceover:

“I need to know: what’s going on with you and the boys?,” she asks. “I don’t want there to be any more lies between us. I won’t tell anyone.”

“It is over, stop. I’m going to fix this family,” the father replies before they walk out of frame.

Then we cut to the brothers, both shirtless and basked in blue light as they walk toward one another for an embrace. After another flash, they’re suddenly splattered in blood and we hear them say, “It’s just us now. We’re on our own.”

The heightened colors, the passionate hug, the abs—the whole thing seems designed to titillate, raising the question: What exactly is going on here? Many have already taken notice of the homoerotic vibes:

And while some seem resigned to the fact that this is the kind of button-pushing, taste-eschewing television Ryan Murphy is wont to make, others seem a bit more disturbed by this seemingly salacious approach:

It would certainly be a new angle to the story—to put it mildly—which has been depicted in film and television a number of times already since the ’90s. The brothers have inspired characters in countless other projects, have been the subject of various television movies (including, most recently, Lifetime’s Menéndez: Blood Brothers in 2017, co-starring Nico Tortorella as the older brother), and were also the focus of NBC’s one-off miniseries Law & Order True Crime in 2017.

We’ll reserve further judgment until we can see the show for ourselves, but until further notice: Consider our eyebrows sufficiently raised.

Image Credit: ‘Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menéndez Story,’ Netflix

All episodes Monsters: The Lyle And Erik Menéndez Story is set to debut September 19 on Netflix, and will be part of an incredibly busy month for Ryan Murphy, which also will see the premiere of his new anthology American Sports Story Sep. 17 on FX, his original horror series Grotesquerie Sep. 25 on FX, and the campy new medical procedural Doctor Odyssey Sep. 26 on ABC.

Does this guy ever sleep?

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