I tried. I made it to the start of episode four, but then I had to give up. I feel terrible for trying, and I feel terrible for not trying hard enough (to finish) – mainly because then I can’t eloquently argue for how much worse it gets. But here we are. I watched three episodes of Netflix’s Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story so that I can tell you not to.

In his book Toward a Theory of True Crime Narratives,  Ian Punnett defines the characteristics of true crime as its nonfiction status; a desire to find (or maintain) justice and avenge victims; a combination of murder and sensationalism; the significance of the forensics investigation; emotional appeal; and the physical location and timing of the crime. The Menendez case captures all of these features, not merely the non-fiction status, and if you’re not clear on how or why, here’s a quick review. Precisely because it captures all of these features is all the more reason why it is absurd and offensive that Ryan Murphy, who created the recent Netflix miniseries, felt the need to add more sensationalism. Because the original story has all the ingredients, and it has the sensationalism in spades. So who not just leave it alone and tell it like it is?

For instance, why is there so much homoeroticism? Why add incest to a story that is already sensational and disturbing enough?

And why make the murder scene so over-the-top sensational and abandon any pretense of factual accuracy? (For instance, daddy Menendez was shot from behind, not facing his children.)

Was the original story not enough? Why did Murphy feel the need to zhuzh it up? The thing about true crime is that it works because we trust you not to lie. Some creative license, sure, but the whole point is that, at some point, it’s got to be “true.”

What else is not true? Well, the title of the show implies that the brothers are the monsters, and if we have learned anything about sexual abuse by 2024, it’s not to blame the victims.

The teaser of the show, as well as the neverending homoeroticism, implies that the brothers are lovers, which is completely fictitious and feels like a cheap attempt to get extra eyeballs. (Ironic that there is more homoeroticism here than in Dahmer, which, you know, is about actual gay people.)

Perhaps most offensively of all, the abuse narrative is buried until episode 4? The fiasco that became the second trial was so egregious precisely because the abuse narrative was excluded. So while, yes, Murphy gets into it, he waits a full three episodes before exposing viewers to the real motive behind the murders. And that’s a problem. Because, on average, Americans watch about an hour a day of Netflix.

So that means that a random viewer is going to have to make it to day FOUR of Monsters/Menendez before they find out why the brothers killed their parents. And considering the miniseries isn’t very good, not only is that unlikely but it is irresponsible. Because it means that most people are going to walk away from the series thinking, like seemingly everyone did during the first two trials, that the brothers were “Greedy Rich Kids” who killed their parents for money.

The horrific nature of what happened to the brothers at the hands of a rigged legal system is, primarily, that the abuse narrative was excluded from the second trial. And based off that, we have a litany of all the other ways they got screwed by the justice system. All we can do now is hope that their habeas petition manages to accomplish some good and that this Ryan Murphy piece of trash doesn’t send more people back in time to the 1990s, back to falsehoods like abuse turns people gay and that the brothers did it for the money.

I can’t help but think about Mommy Dearest, which Faye Dunaway and the studio thought was going to be an Oscar-worthy picture, until, much to their shock, the film’s release went in a totally different direction. Paramount executives were dumbfounded to discover that the film they thought was a serious drama was actually a comedy. They did an immediate pivot—switching to over-the-top ads that the film’s producers found so offensive that they sued Paramount for $10 million and a restraining order against the use of the advertisements—and jumped on board the camp train.

In this case, I find it hard to believe that anyone thought Murphy’s miniseries was a serious drama—I mean, with all those speedos and Milli Vanilli? Not to mention Lyle’s coke-fueled angry tirades and that toupee? And so instead, we have camp, which adds a layer of ridicule to a story that is not at all funny, distancing us even further from the truth at the heart of the story.

Not only is sensationalism a core tenet of true crime, but so is the intentional blurring of fact and fiction in the name of entertainment. For example, there are many books that claim to reveal the truth about the Black Dahlia murder, which really just launder disinformation. When Jack Webb, the star and creator of Dragnet (NBC, 1951-1959) released The Badge: True and Terrifying Crime Stories That Could Not Be Presented on TV (1951), he used as a selling point the fact that it was telling “untold, behind-the scenes accounts” so hard-hitting that they were considered “too violent or sensational for the airwaves” by TV censors. In other words, buy this book to get the truth! (And yet, there was no “truth” to be revealed.) Other so-called revealing tales are Janice Knowlton’s Daddy Was the Black Dahlia Killer (1995), in which she claims that her father, George Knowlton, had been having an affair with Short before murdering her, as well as Steve Hodel’s bestseller Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius for Murder (2003), in which he claims that his father, the doctor George Hodel, killed Short. There is also John Gilmore’s Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder (1994), for which David Lynch bought the film rights; Jacque Damoe’s The Curse of the Black Dahlia (2004); Don Wolfe’s The Black Dahlia Files: The Mob, the Mogul, and the Murder that Transfixed Los Angeles (2006); and Piu Eatwell’s Black Dahlia, Red Rose (2017), all of which claim to shed new light on the long unsolved case and all of which present different facts in different ways, further confusing and clouding what actually happened. Hungry for a solution, audiences buy these books, especially when the Black Dahlia’s name is front and center. Then, of course, those revelations get repeated and laundered and absorbed into the collective consciousness, the original lie or exaggeration repeated so many times that no one knows who started it and everyone assumes it to be true.

James Ellroy also blended fact and fiction in his novel The Black Dahlia (1987). Ellroy recounts having been inspired by Webb’s version of the murder as a child, so this is a clear example of how the layers of lies and inaccuracies build with each new take. Ellroy took Webb’s embellishments and then added his own. Despite the title and the glamorous photo of Elizabeth Short on the cover of the book, there are many fictional components, including the addition of a solution to the crime—and again, no clear demarcation between fact and fiction. Also troubling are claims that Short acted in pornographic films and slept with women, neither of which have any validity, but which would be repeated in other narratives until they, too, felt like fact. This book was also adapted into a film—The Black Dahlia (Brian De Palma, 2006), starring Scarlett Johansson, Josh Hartnett, and Aaron Eckhart—as well as a graphic novel by director David Fincher and writer Alex Nolent (under the name Matz), published in French in 2013 as Le Dahlia noir (2013), and in English as The Black Dahlia: A Crime Graphic Novel (2016). So we go from Webb’s embellished version to Ellroy’s fictional version, to the film and then to a graphic novel, the lies and gossip metastasizing into “fact” with each progressive launder. Taking “creative non-fiction” one step further, Joyce Carol Oates published Black Dahlia & White Rose in 2012, a collection of short fiction in which the title story recounts the friendship between Elizabeth Short and her roommate, Norma Jeane Baker, aka Marilyn Monroe. That never happened.

Short would appear in season one of Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story (“Spooky Little Girl, FX, Nov. 30, 2011), which again plays completely loose with the facts, making it out to be a dentist who killed her, she again is an aspiring actress (a popular bit of fiction that has been repeated so many times as to be considered “fact”), she trades sexual favors for medical appointments, among other necessities. In this episode, it is not just that Short is desperate to become an actress but that she is desperate to become famous, whatever the cost, an aspect of her character that has zero basis in fact.

This is the dilemma of any docudrama—what gets altered in order to maximize entertainment value, and how much does this alteration affect the label of “true crime”? How many facts must be included in order for something to be “true”? And when we just make things up, using real people, do we have any obligation to indicate that what we have done is fiction? And why does this matter if this happens all the time?

Because the Menendez brothers are still in jail. Because the only thing standing in between them and the rest of their lives in prison is a habeas petition, which hangs on evidence painstakingly exposed by Robert Rand. So every factual inaccuracy matters. Public perception matters. Public pressure matters. We need people to know the truth, not some manipulated sensationalist Hard Copy-esque version of it.

I’d urge you to keep watching the miniseries at least until episode 4, just so you can start to get to the truth, but no one deserves that, so why don’t you just watch this instead?