Netflix’s Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is arriving with its verdict already built in. A review of the series, from Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s murder-verse, says the show treats Lizzie Borden as the person who wielded the ax in the August 1892 deaths of her father and stepmother.
That is why the Lizzie Borden Netflix Monster search is spiking now: the series is set to air on Thursday, Sept. 17, and the cast alone has made it one of the most watched entries in the Monster franchise. Ella Beatty stars as Lizzie Borden, with Charlie Hunnam, Rebecca Hall and Vicky Krieps alongside her, and the premiere is directed by Max Winkler.
The cast is not the part that is under debate. Beatty is front and center as Lizzie, while Hunnam and Hall play Andrew and Abby, and Krieps appears as Maggie, a new housemaid written into the story to push the drama forward. The review also points back to 2018’s Lizzie, which starred Chloë Sevigny and Kristen Stewart, as another recent take on the same case.
What separates this series from the historical record is the way it removes uncertainty. Lizzie Borden in Monster is not framed as a woman accused and judged by the public; she is presented as guilty from the start, even though the real-life Lizzie always denied responsibility for the August 1892 deaths. That choice gives the show a cleaner dramatic engine, but it also narrows the space for doubt that has always surrounded the case.
The final hour appears to lean into that certainty rather than soften it. The review quotes Lizzie’s last beat as her saying, “OK, let’s make it mean something,” a line that turns the story away from mystery and toward self-aware reckoning. For viewers, the question is less who the show is about than how much room it leaves for the truth that has followed Lizzie Borden for more than a century.
