Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennen’s new series about the Nineties true crime saga premieres this month on Netflix
Excess, violence, and the kind of family psychodrama that would make Sigmund Freud’s eyes pop — yes, the first full trailer for Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story is here.
The new series from Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennen will dig into the infamous Nineties true crime story, in which brothers Lyle and Erik Menendez shot and killed their parents, José and Kitty, at the family’s home in Beverly Hills. The clip opens with a recreation of that fateful night, paired with audio from a different scene in which the brothers are encouraged to open up about what happened and reconnect as brothers.
“Erik and I killed our parents together, so, I think that makes us pretty close,” Lyle deadpans in the trailer.
From there, the trailer teases the many fascinating angles of the Menendez saga. Most prominently, there’s the media circus that sprang up around the brothers’ trial, which became a sensation while airing on Court TV, but also Erik and Lyle’s eventual defense that they killed their parents after suffering years of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse.
Nathan Lane portrays Dominick Duane, who famously covered the story for Vanity Fair in 1990 and lays out a potentially heavy truth at the end of the clip: “You don’t murder your parents that way. Literally, defacing them. That’s not about money — that’s about something deeper and darker.”
Monsters stars Nicholas Alexander Chavez and Cooper Koch as Lyle and Erik, while Javier Bardem and Chloë Sevigny will play José and Kitty. Along with Lane, the core cast also features Ari Graynor as the brothers’ defense attorney, Leslie Abramson.
Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story is set to premiere Sept. 19 on Netflix.