A Female ‘Monster’ Marks a Structural Pivot for the Franchise
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is the fourth season of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s true crime anthology series, reframing the infamous 1892 axe murders through a female-led, feminist, darkly comic lens that challenges the franchise’s previous focus on male killers and interrogates how gender, sexuality, and repression shape both crime narratives and cultural mythmaking. This is not a minor tweak; it is a structural pivot. Until now, Monster has built its brand on male perpetrators—Jeffrey Dahmer, the Menendez brothers, Ed Gein—whose crimes seem to swallow the people around them. With Monster Lizzie Borden Netflix is forced to confront an uncomfortable truth: the franchise’s aesthetics and ethics change when the central “monster” is a woman accused, acquitted, and mythologized rather than convicted and pathologized. That creative gamble could either refresh the series or expose its limits.
Ella Beatty’s Lizzie Borden and the Power of Female Rage
Casting Ella Beatty as Lizzie Borden is more than a lineage footnote; it signals Ryan Murphy’s intent to treat Lizzie as a complex protagonist rather than a campy axe murderer archetype. Beatty becomes the first woman to take the central Monster role, inheriting a mantle previously held by Evan Peters, Cooper Koch, Nicholas Alexander Chavez, and Charlie Hunnam. Around her, Murphy assembles a loaded ensemble—Vicky Krieps as Bridget Sullivan, Rebecca Hall as Abby Borden, Charlie Hunnam as Andrew Borden, with Sarah Paulson adding proven Monster gravitas. Beatty has already described the season as an examination of “female rage and repression” that feels strikingly relevant, and that focus is the real disruption. Instead of forensic obsession with an Ella Beatty axe murderer, Monster season 4 appears determined to ask why women’s anger terrifies society more than their potential violence.
Sapphic Desire and Dark Comedy Rewrite the Monster Formula
The boldest swing in Ryan Murphy Monster season 4 is its sapphic core and darkly comic tone. The narrative leans into theories that Lizzie and Bridget Sullivan—and possibly actor friend Nance O’Neil—shared lesbian relationships that reframed the Bordens’ home as a pressure cooker of humiliation, desire, and fantasy. That fantasy spirals into sex, power, revenge, and murder, and the show refuses to treat queerness as mere subtext: the sapphic twist is the emotional engine. At the same time, the season is described by its cast as “Ryan Murphy does Cinderella,” with modern needle drops from artists like Kate Bush and Wet Leg injecting irony into the Victorian gloom. According to one first-look report, “the new season takes the franchise in a bold, darkly comic new direction,” explicitly positioning humor and queer longing as tools to critique the era’s gender politics.
From Male Killer Mythology to Gendered Legend-Making
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story does something the earlier seasons rarely attempted: it treats the crime as secondary to the making of a legend. The series starts inside the suffocating Borden household, where Lizzie and Bridget are trapped under the cruelty of a wealthy family and escape into a shared fantasy before the axe ever appears. That framing matters. Previous installments fixated on the mechanics of male violence; here, the focus shifts to the social forces that made people believe a woman could not possibly commit such brutality—and then turned her into a cultural icon when she was acquitted. As co-creator Ian Brennan notes, contemporary society saw women “as almost a completely different species,” and that bias shaped Lizzie’s trial and its aftermath. By interrogating that bias, season 4 argues that true crime anthology series cannot keep pretending gender is a footnote in stories about public fascination.
Why This Season Could Redefine Monster’s Future
All eight episodes of Monster Lizzie Borden Netflix will drop globally on September 17, 2026, and the release feels like a test of the franchise’s long-term identity. If audiences respond to a female-led, queer, darkly comic take on an ambiguous case, Murphy and Brennan gain permission to move Monster beyond its reliance on male serial killers and courtroom spectacle. If they do not, the series risks calcifying into a familiar carousel of violent men and traumatized victims. The Lizzie Borden season also forces a moral reckoning: are we watching to luxuriate in blood, or to examine how culture creates “monsters” out of people history refused to understand? By centering sapphic desire, female rage, and the absurdity of Victorian gender norms, Monster season 4 suggests that the franchise’s future lies less in escalating shock and more in interrogating why some stories become myths while others vanish.
