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'Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story' Creator Reveals 10-Season Plan · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: In 1892, an all-male jury in Fall River, Massachusetts, walked
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: into a deliberation room.
• 0:05
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: And they had to decide the fate of a Sunday
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: school teacher. She was accused of hacking her father and
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: stepmother to death with a hatchet.
• 0:14
  Speaker 2: A pretty gruesome scene.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: Incredibly gruesome. And they stayed in that room for a
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: little over an hour. But historical consensus actually suggests they
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: made up their minds in about 10 minutes. Wow.
• 0:26
  Speaker 2: Just 10 minutes.
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah. They simply sat there, you know, pretending to deliberate
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: just so it wouldn't look completely ridiculous when they acquitted her.
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: Right, because they had to put on a show of
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: actually thinking about it.
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: Exactly. And why? Because the very concept of a white
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: upper middle class Victorian woman possessing like the sheer physical
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: brutality and the psychological darkness required to cave in a
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: human skull.
• 0:51
  Speaker 2: It was unthinkable.
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: It was so offensive to their worldview that they literally
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: couldn't compute it. So sexism quite literally saved Lizzie Borden's life.
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: That is such a wild way to look at it.
• 1:03
  Speaker 2: But yeah, it's absolutely true. Right.
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: And now you cut to today. Netflix and the creators
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: of that massive true crime anthology series, Monster.
• 1:13
  Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: Huge show. They are betting hundreds of millions of dollars
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: and this massive global audience on the exact opposite premise. Right.
• 1:22
  Speaker 2: That women are completely capable of this. Yes.
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: That not only are women capable of this kind of rage,
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: but that this rage is actually a structural, inescapable part
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: of the human condition. So, welcome to The Deep Dive.
• 1:38
  Speaker 2: I mean, it is quite the philosophical whiplash when you
• 1:41
  Speaker 2: frame it that way.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: It really is.
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: You know, you are going from a society that actively
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: deleted female violence from its reality to a modern entertainment
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: complex that is, well, putting it under a global magnifying glass.
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: And that is exactly what we are dissecting today. We
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: are looking at this deeply revealing interview from The Hollywood Reporter.
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: It's dated September 18, 2026, and it's with Ian Brennan.
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: He's the co-creator of the Monster franchise, right? Alongside Ryan Murphy?
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: Yes, exactly. And the series just dropped its fourth season, Monster,
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: The Lizzie Borden Story. But I want to make a
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: promise to you listening right now.
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: A very important promise. Yeah.
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: We are not here to just, like, recount the forensics
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: of a 19th century double homicide. I mean, you can
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: find a million deep dives that will just read you
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: the autopsy report. Oh, absolutely.
• 2:27
  Speaker 2: There's plenty of that out there. Right.
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: Our mission today is entirely different. We are going backstage.
• 2:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah, behind the curtain.
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: We're looking at the creative alchemy, the intense psychological mapping,
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: and frankly, the terrifying ethical calculus that goes into turning
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: real life bloodshed into prestige television.
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: And the stakes of this conversation are incredibly high, honestly.
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: How so?
• 2:50
  Speaker 2: Well, because these showrunners, they kind of dictate the cultural
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: memory now.
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: Oh, that's a good point.
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: Right. When you have a platform like Netflix reaching hundreds
• 2:58
  Speaker 2: of millions of screens all over the world, you are
• 3:00
  Speaker 2: no longer just telling a story.
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: You're making history.
• 3:03
  Speaker 2: Exactly. You are minting the historical record. How Ian Brennan
• 3:07
  Speaker 2: and Ryan Murphy choose to frame Lizzie Borden, that will
• 3:11
  Speaker 2: become the definitive version of her reality for an entire generation.
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah. People will just accept it as fact.
• 3:17
  Speaker 2: Right. It shapes how we understand the psychology of violence,
• 3:19
  Speaker 2: the history of gender dynamics, and, you know, the mechanisms
• 3:22
  Speaker 2: of justice itself.
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: So let's get into the mechanics of how a story
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: like this even gets chosen in the first place.
• 3:29
  Speaker 2: Let's do it.
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: Because the origin story of this specific season absolutely floored me.
• 3:35
  Speaker 2: It's so surprising.
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: They didn't even start with Lizzie Borden. They were actively
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: trying to develop a season around a completely different, intensely
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: modern case.
• 3:44
  Speaker 2: The Luigi Mangione story.
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 3:47
  Speaker 2: I mean, the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in
• 3:50
  Speaker 2: late 2024. For anyone who remembers that December, it was
• 3:53
  Speaker 2: an absolute cultural earthquake.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: It was everywhere. You couldn't escape it.
• 3:58
  Speaker 2: You had this brazen, targeted assassination in the middle of Manhattan,
• 4:02
  Speaker 2: followed by a sprawling manhunt. Right. And it sparked this massive,
• 4:07
  Speaker 2: instantaneous societal debate about the morality of the American healthcare system.
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I remember.
• 4:12
  Speaker 2: It was the only thing anyone was talking about. It
• 4:14
  Speaker 2: had All the hallmarks of a major, major thriller.
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: But they abandoned it.
• 4:20
  Speaker 2: They just dropped it. Yeah.
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: Brennan flat out tells the interviewer that they spent time
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: trying to crack it and they just walked away. And
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: he used some very specific words to describe why, which
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: I found fascinating.
• 4:31
  Speaker 2: What did he say?
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: He called the process of trying to adapt the Mangione
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: case laborious. He said the story felt too new, too unknown.
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: And interestingly, he called it esoteric.
• 4:44
  Speaker 2: Esoteric.
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 4:46
  Speaker 2: Wow. Yeah.
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: He felt it lacked a visceral punch. So they basically
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: scrapped this highly relevant, heavily debated modern tragedy. And out
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: of nowhere, Ryan Murphy suggests Lizzie Borden.
• 4:58
  Speaker 2: And the origin of that suggestion is fascinating, purely from
• 5:02
  Speaker 2: a cultural folklore perspective, honestly.
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: Tell me about it.
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: So Murphy grew up in the Midwest, and he apparently
• 5:07
  Speaker 2: won a kindergarten choral competition singing that infamous Lizzie Borden
• 5:11
  Speaker 2: jump rope rhyme.
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: Oh, my gosh. Wait, a kindergarten choir? Yeah.
• 5:16
  Speaker 2: Lizzie Borden took an ax and gave her mother 40 whacks.
• 5:18
  Speaker 2: We all know it.
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: It is so dark for kindergartners.
• 5:21
  Speaker 2: Right. But the fact that a kindergarten choir was cheerfully
• 5:25
  Speaker 2: chanting about a double parasite really underscores how completely this
• 5:30
  Speaker 2: specific crime has been sanitized by time. Wow.
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 5:34
  Speaker 2: It has transitioned from a horrific, bloody reality into just
• 5:38
  Speaker 2: like a piece of gothic Americana.
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: And Brennan immediately jumped on it. He realized that after
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: spending three seasons completely immersed in the psychology of male killers,
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: they did Jeffrey Dahmer, the Menendez brothers, Ed Gein.
• 5:50
  Speaker 2: Right, all men.
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: Exactly. They hadn't even looked at women. And his rationale
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: was simply proportional. He noted that statistically, so few women
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: commit murder that it just hadn't crossed their radar as
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: a focal point for an entire season.
• 6:03
  Speaker 2: But the pivot from Mangione to Borden, it really reveals
• 6:06
  Speaker 2: the underlying physics of the true crime genre, I think.
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: What do you mean?
• 6:10
  Speaker 2: Well, there's a necessary psychological distance required to turn a
• 6:13
  Speaker 2: tragedy into entertainment.
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: Ah, right.
• 6:16
  Speaker 2: The Mangione case is entirely too close. The shockwaves are
• 6:19
  Speaker 2: still actively moving through the culture. The victims' families are
• 6:22
  Speaker 2: still in raw grief.
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's just too soon. Exactly.
• 6:26
  Speaker 2: The corporate and legal ramifications are likely still playing out
• 6:29
  Speaker 2: in real time. Society hasn't collectively decided what the narrative
• 6:32
  Speaker 2: of that event actually is yet.
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: It feels like trying to paint a portrait while the
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: subject is still running around the room on fire.
• 6:39
  Speaker 2: That is a perfect way to describe it.
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: You're dealing with wet paint. It's messy. You can't control
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: the edges. And the paint is going to get all
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: over you. There are active lawsuits. There are living people
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: who will go on Twitter and dispute your interpretation. Oh, absolutely.
• 6:54
  Speaker 2: The backlash would be instant.
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: But Lizzie Borden, that is an antique canvas. The paint
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: dried over 130 years ago.
• 7:02
  Speaker 2: Everyone involved is long gone.
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: Exactly. All the primary players are dead. The immediate descendants
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: are gone. You can pick that canvas up, strip the
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: original varnish off, and put it in whatever modern neon
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: frame you want, and nobody is going to sue you.
• 7:16
  Speaker 2: And that is the exact utility of historical true crime.
• 7:20
  Speaker 2: Brennan talks about a concept he calls gravity.
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: Gravity.
• 7:23
  Speaker 2: Like narrative gravity.
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 7:25
  Speaker 2: When they are pitching ideas in the writer's room, they
• 7:27
  Speaker 2: are waiting for a subject to generate its own gravitational pull.
• 7:31
  Speaker 2: He describes it like a snowball rolling down a hill.
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: Okay, I can see that.
• 7:36
  Speaker 2: If the core is right, the narrative momentum just builds effortlessly.
• 7:40
  Speaker 2: The Mangione case, because it is so steeped in modern bureaucracy,
• 7:43
  Speaker 2: health care policy, and unresolved legal questions, it has a
• 7:47
  Speaker 2: lot of friction.
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: It gets bogged down. Right.
• 7:49
  Speaker 2: It doesn't roll easily. Lizzie Borden, on the other hand,
• 7:53
  Speaker 2: is a self-contained explosion within a single Victorian household. The
• 7:57
  Speaker 2: gravity is incredibly dense and localized.
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: Okay, but I want to unpack this a bit and
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: actually challenge that requirement for A visceral punch.
• 8:07
  Speaker 2: Go for it.
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: Because Brendan said the CEO murder was too esoteric and
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: not visceral enough. Doesn't that expose a pretty dark reality
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: about what we, the audience, actually demand from true crime?
• 8:20
  Speaker 2: It definitely points a finger back at the viewer.
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: Right. I mean, a corporate assassination that ties into systemic
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: health care issues is terrifying, but it's a cerebral terror.
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: Are Brennan and Murphy basically admitting that unless there is
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: a physical hatchet swinging in a parlor, unless we get
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: that very specific theatrical bloodletting, the audience is just going
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: to change the channel?
• 8:42
  Speaker 2: It forces us to confront the difference between a tragedy
• 8:45
  Speaker 2: and a drama, really.
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: Say more about that.
• 8:48
  Speaker 2: Well, bureaucratic violence, the kind of systemic violence tied up
• 8:52
  Speaker 2: in the Mangione story, is insidious and arguably more destructive
• 8:56
  Speaker 2: on a societal level.
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: For sure.
• 8:58
  Speaker 2: But it is incredibly difficult to dramatize over 10 hours
• 9:01
  Speaker 2: without turning into a documentary or, you know, a dry procedural. Yeah.
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: Nobody wants to watch 10 hours of board meetings. Exactly.
• 9:09
  Speaker 2: Lizzie Borden provides a primal archetypal terror. It is the
• 9:14
  Speaker 2: desecration of the family unit. It's a daughter turning against
• 9:17
  Speaker 2: the father. That taps into fears that are as old
• 9:20
  Speaker 2: as Greek mythology. Wow. Yeah. True crime as a genre
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: is ultimately looking for Greek tragedy, not a white-collar thriller.
• 9:27
  Speaker 2: It needs that visceral domestic destruction to sustain the emotional
• 9:31
  Speaker 2: intensity of a serialized television show.
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: Okay, if we accept that premise, that they absolutely need
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: this primal, visceral anchor, then their next creative decision is
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: completely mind-boggling to me.
• 9:44
  Speaker 2: The structure of the season.
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: Yes, because once they settled on this antique canvas of
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: Lizzie Borden, they decided that one canvas wasn't going to
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: be enough.
• 9:52
  Speaker 2: No, they went huge.
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: They realized that Exploring female violence required a much wider lens.
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: They didn't just want to tell the story of one woman.
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: They wanted to build a thesis about an entire gender.
• 10:03
  Speaker 2: And this is where the season's structure becomes wildly ambitious.
• 10:07
  Speaker 2: Brennan explains that they built a triptych.
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: Like a three-paneled painting.
• 10:11
  Speaker 2: Exactly, a three-paneled narrative structure. Lizzie Borden is the centerpiece,
• 10:15
  Speaker 2: but they expand the scope dramatically. They bring in Elizabeth Bathory,
• 10:19
  Speaker 2: the Hungarian noblewoman from the late 16th and early 17th centuries.
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: Who is often cited as one of the most prolific
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: female serial killers in history.
• 10:27
  Speaker 2: Right. So she represents the distant past. Then, representing the
• 10:32
  Speaker 2: modern era, they bring in Aileen Wuornos, the American serial
• 10:35
  Speaker 2: killer who operated in Florida in the late 80s and
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: early 90s.
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: And they don't just tell these stories in isolation, right?
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: They actively intertwine them.
• 10:43
  Speaker 2: Yes, they are all connected.
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: According to the internal logic of the show, Lizzie Borden
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: is aware of the dark folklore of Elizabeth Bathory. And
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: then decades later, Aileen Wuornos is aware of the legend
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: of Lizzie Borden.
• 10:56
  Speaker 2: It's like they are having a conversation across centuries.
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: Brennan says this overarching structure was designed specifically to explore
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: female rage. He wanted to examine the cages society puts
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: women in and the extreme violent measures they will take
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: to break out of those cages.
• 11:13
  Speaker 2: The cage metaphor is central to the whole season.
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah, he was terrified of the show feeling like a stuffy,
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: static historical diorama. So he used this triptych to give
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: it a frantic, cross-temporal momentum.
• 11:26
  Speaker 2: Mechanically, for a television writer, this solves a massive pacing issue.
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: Oh, I bet.
• 11:31
  Speaker 2: If you are locked in a repressed Victorian house for
• 11:34
  Speaker 2: 10 hours, the audience might just suffocate.
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: It would get so claustrophobic. Right.
• 11:38
  Speaker 2: So by cutting away to the feudal brutality of 16th
• 11:41
  Speaker 2: century Hungary... or the gritty neon-lit highways of 1990s Florida,
• 11:45
  Speaker 2: you provide tonal relief and aesthetic variety.
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: That makes total sense.
• 11:49
  Speaker 2: But philosophically, it is a massive statement. Society has a
• 11:53
  Speaker 2: deeply ingrained habit of treating women who commit extreme violence
• 11:57
  Speaker 2: as spontaneous anomalies.
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: Like they're just crazy. Exactly.
• 12:01
  Speaker 2: We view them as glitches in the matrix.
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: By placing Bathory, Borden, and Wuornos on a continuum... the
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: creators are arguing that female violence is not an anomaly.
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: They are arguing it is an inevitable reaction to structural confinement.
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: I do see the narrative appeal of the cage metaphor.
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: You look at Bathory, and her cage is one of
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: absolute aristocratic isolation and unchecked feudal power.
• 12:25
  Speaker 2: Right, combined with intense patriarchal expectations.
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: She is trapped at the very top of the food chain.
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: Then Borden's cage is the suffocating, hyper-repressive environment of a
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: Victorian parlor where women were legally infantilized and financially entirely
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: dependent on their fathers.
• 12:42
  Speaker 2: Utterly trapped in the domestic sphere.
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: And then Warnus' cage is the brutal, unforgiving reality of
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: extreme poverty, sexual violence, and living on the absolute margins
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: of late 20th century America. Exactly.
• 12:55
  Speaker 2: The aesthetics of the cages change wildly, but the structural
• 12:58
  Speaker 2: function is the same, which is confinement. The show is
• 13:01
  Speaker 2: attempting to trace the genealogy of the rage that confinement produces.
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: But hold on. We really need to critically examine this choice.
• 13:09
  Speaker 2: Okay, let's do it.
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: By linking these three specific women under the umbrella of
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: female rage, aren't they just flattening history to fit a
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: catchy modern thesis?
• 13:19
  Speaker 2: It's a huge risk, yeah.
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: I mean, Elizabeth Bathory was a wildly wealthy, powerful aristocrat
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: who allegedly tortured and murdered hundreds of young peasant girls
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: for sadistic pleasure.
• 13:29
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: Aileen Wuornos was an impoverished sex worker who, who had
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: suffered a lifetime of profound trauma and abuse, who shot
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: men she claims were trying to assault her. Those are
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: fundamentally entirely different psychological profiles.
• 13:44
  Speaker 2: They couldn't be more different.
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: The economic and social drivers are light years apart. So
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: does throwing them into the same narrative blender just because
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: they all share a gender risk deeply misunderstanding and frankly
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: misrepresenting their actual motives?
• 13:59
  Speaker 2: That is the ultimate tightrope of historical fiction. When you
• 14:02
  Speaker 2: construct a narrative this stylized, you have to ask yourself,
• 14:06
  Speaker 2: is the show excusating historical truth, or is it projecting
• 14:10
  Speaker 2: a 21st century thesis backward into time?
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: Projecting backward. Yes, exactly.
• 14:16
  Speaker 2: There is a very real danger of false equivalence here.
• 14:19
  Speaker 2: The survival-based, trauma-induced violence of Wuornos is psychologically distinct from
• 14:24
  Speaker 2: the predatory power-based violence attributed to Bathory.
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: Totally.
• 14:28
  Speaker 2: If the show suggests that all female violence stems from
• 14:30
  Speaker 2: a universal female rage, it risks erasing the critical intersections
• 14:35
  Speaker 2: of class, wealth, and power that actually dictate who gets
• 14:38
  Speaker 2: to be violent and who gets punished for it.
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: Oh, that's such a good point.
• 14:41
  Speaker 2: Bathory was violent because her wealth shielded her from consequences
• 14:44
  Speaker 2: for decades. Wuornos was violent because she had absolutely no
• 14:48
  Speaker 2: shield at all.
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: So, listener, think about that as you watch these kinds
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: of shows. When a storyteller presents you with a sequence,
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: when they say, A leads to B leads to C.
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: Your brain naturally wants to accept that pattern.
• 15:01
  Speaker 2: We crave patterns.
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: It feels satisfying. But you have to ask yourself if
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: the pieces actually fit together or if the writer just
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: hammered them into the same shape to make the puzzle
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: look complete.
• 15:12
  Speaker 2: Right. Do they force it?
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: It makes you wonder how much of the Lizzie Borden
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: story in this season is actual 1892 history and how
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: much is just the connective tissue they invented to make
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: the triptych work.
• 15:24
  Speaker 2: Which brings us to a really stunning admission from Ian
• 15:27
  Speaker 2: Brennan regarding his historical research.
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: Oh, this part blew my mind.
• 15:31
  Speaker 2: In the interview, he openly admits that before starting this
• 15:34
  Speaker 2: massive undertaking, he knew next to nothing about the actual
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: facts of the Lizzie Borden case. Right.
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: He knew the jump rope rhyme, but he explicitly states
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: he didn't even know she was acquitted.
• 15:45
  Speaker 2: Incredible.
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: He had to learn during the preliminary research phase that
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: she actually beat the charges in Fall River.
• 15:52
  Speaker 2: That acquittal is the defining historical feature of the case.
• 15:55
  Speaker 2: And the fact that a showrunner was unaware of it
• 15:57
  Speaker 2: speaks volumes about how folklore devours fact.
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: Folklore devours fact. I love that.
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: But when they did dig into the trial, they encountered
• 16:06
  Speaker 2: the exact systemic mechanism you mentioned at the start. The
• 16:09
  Speaker 2: 10-minute phantom deliberation.
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: Yes, the jury that just sat there.
• 16:14
  Speaker 2: The 1892 justice system was built entirely on a foundation
• 16:18
  Speaker 2: of gendered assumptions. The all-male jury, the male judge, the
• 16:21
  Speaker 2: male prosecutors, none of them could reconcile the physical reality
• 16:25
  Speaker 2: of the butchery with the social reality of the defendant.
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: It just didn't compute for them.
• 16:30
  Speaker 2: Right. A Sunday school teacher in a respectable dress does
• 16:33
  Speaker 2: not swing a hatchet into her stepmother's skull. It caused
• 16:37
  Speaker 2: a complete cognitive collapse in the courtroom.
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: So how does the show handle that collapse? Because they
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: do something incredibly bold.
• 16:44
  Speaker 2: They really do.
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: They completely eliminate the mystery. Brennan says the season opens
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: immediately with the murders. They show her doing it.
• 16:52
  Speaker 2: Right from the jump.
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: There is absolutely no ambiguity, no did she or didn't
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: she teasing. They plant a flag in the ground in
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: episode one and say, this is what happened.
• 17:02
  Speaker 2: This is a crucial philosophical choice regarding how they view
• 17:05
  Speaker 2: the historical record. Brennan compares this decision to their earlier
• 17:09
  Speaker 2: season focusing on the Menendez brothers.
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: Okay, how so?
• 17:12
  Speaker 2: He notes that when you are dealing with a crime
• 17:14
  Speaker 2: where the primary victims, the parents, are dead... you are
• 17:17
  Speaker 2: left with a massive narrative void. The people who actually
• 17:20
  Speaker 2: know the interpersonal dynamics of that household cannot speak.
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: Right, their voices are gone.
• 17:25
  Speaker 2: And that void, Brennan argues, is immediately filled with lies, obfuscations,
• 17:30
  Speaker 2: and self-serving narratives from the survivors.
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: And he describes the American Victorian era as having fetishized repression.
• 17:38
  Speaker 2: It's a great phrase.
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: It was an entire culture built on maintaining a pristine
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: outward appearance, while burying every dark, ugly reality beneath the floorboards.
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: So if the culture itself is fundamentally dishonest, then the
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: court transcripts, the police reports, and the newspaper articles from
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: 1892 are also inherently dishonest. Exactly. They are products of
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: a society that is lying to itself.
• 18:02
  Speaker 2: So by opening with the murders, Brennan and Murphy are
• 18:05
  Speaker 2: arguing that ambiguity in this specific context isn't mysterious. It's
• 18:09
  Speaker 2: a capitulation to Victorian lies.
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: Oh, wow.
• 18:12
  Speaker 2: Right. If they leave it ambiguous, they are just repeating
• 18:15
  Speaker 2: the blind spots of the 1892 jury. By showing the
• 18:18
  Speaker 2: violence up front, they bypass the historical gaslighting and lock
• 18:22
  Speaker 2: the audience into the brutal reality of the Borden household.
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: But rejecting the official historical record means you have to
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: build your own. And this leads to one of the
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: most revealing moments in the entire interview.
• 18:33
  Speaker 2: The undertaker detail.
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: Yes. The reporter asks Brennan about a specific, incredibly grotesque
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: detail in the script. It's the fact that Andrew Borden,
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: Lizzie's father, who worked as an undertaker, would routinely chop
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: off the legs of corpses just so they would fit
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: into cheaper, smaller caskets to save money.
• 18:51
  Speaker 2: It's so morbid.
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: And Brennan's response is astonishing. He basically says, I think
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: that is true, although I have to check.
• 18:59
  Speaker 2: He isn't even completely sure it's a verified historical fact. No.
• 19:03
  Speaker 2: Yet it's a defining character trait in a globally broadcast
• 19:06
  Speaker 2: television show.
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: Yes. But he uses that exact uncertainty to explain his
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: entire philosophy of writing true crime. He argues that if
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: you write a script that only contains the 12 independently
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: verified ironclad facts about a historical figure, you are actually
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: writing a lie by omission.
• 19:25
  Speaker 2: A lie by omission?
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: Because a human life is not just 12 bullet points.
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: You're leaving out the connective tissue, the daily humiliations, the
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: unspoken resentments, the atmospheric tension of the house.
• 19:38
  Speaker 2: All the stuff that actually drives human behavior.
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: Exactly. Brandon believes you have to invent that connective tissue.
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: You have to fill in the gaps with emotional truth
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: to tell a story that feels true. than the dry facts.
• 19:51
  Speaker 2: It's the central paradox of adapting history, really.
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: How do you mean?
• 19:55
  Speaker 2: Often, the strict adherence to verifiable facts creates a sterile,
• 19:59
  Speaker 2: lifeless portrait that fails to convey the actual human experience
• 20:02
  Speaker 2: of the event. If the goal is to understand why
• 20:05
  Speaker 2: Lizzie Borden picked up a hatchet, the court transcripts are useless.
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: Because they're just legal documents.
• 20:11
  Speaker 2: Right. They only tell you how the state failed to
• 20:14
  Speaker 2: prove she did it. To find the why, the writer
• 20:17
  Speaker 2: has to extrapolate backward from the violence.
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: They have to reverse engineer it. Yes.
• 20:23
  Speaker 2: They look at the fact of the murder, look at
• 20:25
  Speaker 2: the strictures of Victorian society, and they invent the daily
• 20:28
  Speaker 2: psychological torture required to bridge the gap between those two realities.
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: I was trying to conceptualize how they build these scripts.
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: And it reminds me of a paleontologist working in a
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: natural history museum. Imagine you go out into the desert
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: and you excavate a dinosaur. But time has destroyed almost everything.
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: You only find 12 real fossilized bones. Right. If you
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: bring those 12 bones back to the museum and just
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: scatter them on the floor, the audience is going to
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: walk by and think it's just a pile of rocks.
• 20:58
  Speaker 2: They won't see the dinosaur.
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: Exactly. They won't feel the scale, the shape, or the
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: terror of the animal. To make the audience understand what
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: that creature actually was, the paleontologist has to sculpt the
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: missing 80% of the skeleton out of plaster.
• 21:14
  Speaker 2: Ah, right.
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: You use the 12 real bones as anchor points, and
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: you invent the plaster bones based on your best educated
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: guess of the anatomy. Brennan is saying you have to
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: build the plaster bones or the audience will never see
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: the monster.
• 21:27
  Speaker 2: And the plaster in this analogy is the invented dialogue
• 21:30
  Speaker 2: behind closed doors, the imagined facial expressions, the private moments
• 21:35
  Speaker 2: of despair that were never recorded in any diary.
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: Yes, exactly.
• 21:39
  Speaker 2: That detail about chopping the legs off corpses, whether factually
• 21:42
  Speaker 2: verified or slightly embellished, serves as brilliant plaster.
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: Because it tells you who he is. Right.
• 21:49
  Speaker 2: It instantly establishes Andrew Borden as a man so profoundly
• 21:53
  Speaker 2: cheap and devoid of empathy that he would desecrate the
• 21:56
  Speaker 2: dead to save a dollar. If he treats the dead
• 21:59
  Speaker 2: that way... How suffocatingly must he treat his living, financially
• 22:03
  Speaker 2: dependent daughters?
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: It sets the stage for everything.
• 22:06
  Speaker 2: It builds the psychological foundation for Parasite.
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: But here is where we have to slam on the
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: brakes and ask the difficult question.
• 22:14
  Speaker 2: The ethics of it all.
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: Is it ethical to sculpt those plaster bones when the
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: subject isn't a dinosaur, but a real human being who
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: actually lived and died?
• 22:24
  Speaker 2: It's a huge moral gray area.
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: When you invent dialogue and deeply disturbing motivations for real people,
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: where is the boundary between historical empathy and outright defamation?
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: If Brendan puts the corpse mutilation detail into a massive
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: Netflix series without fully verifying it, millions of people are
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: going to internalize that as absolute historical fact.
• 22:47
  Speaker 2: They won't know it was plaster.
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: Exactly.
• 22:49
  Speaker 2: This is the immense cultural power we discussed at the beginning.
• 22:52
  Speaker 2: the audience naturally blurs the line between a dramatized narrative
• 22:55
  Speaker 2: and a documentary record.
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: We just accept what we see.
• 22:59
  Speaker 2: Especially when a show is as meticulously produced as Monster,
• 23:02
  Speaker 2: with incredibly accurate period costumes and sets, it signals to
• 23:06
  Speaker 2: the brain that what it is watching is authentic.
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: The production value buys trust.
• 23:11
  Speaker 2: Exactly. The viewer assumes the psychological interiority is as historically
• 23:15
  Speaker 2: accurate as the wallpaper. The creators are prioritizing thematic truth
• 23:19
  Speaker 2: over literal truth. but they are broadcasting it to an
• 23:22
  Speaker 2: audience that largely consumes it as literal history.
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: And a brilliantly sculpted plaster dinosaur doesn't just stand up
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: on its own. It needs a massive engine to bring
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: it to life. Which brings us to the casting.
• 23:34
  Speaker 2: Which is phenomenal in this show.
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: You can write the most brilliant psychological subtext in the world,
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: but if the actor cannot physically manifest that repression, the
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: whole thing collapses. The search for Lizzie was apparently exhaustive.
• 23:48
  Speaker 2: Brennan noted that they auditioned a tremendous amount of talent.
• 23:52
  Speaker 2: He said they saw great, great, great people, but the
• 23:55
  Speaker 2: specific alchemy wasn't there.
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: Until they saw one tape. Right.
• 24:00
  Speaker 2: Then they received a tape from Ella Beatty. According to Brennan,
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: it took only five seconds of watching her performance to
• 24:05
  Speaker 2: realize she was the one.
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: Five seconds? What do you even see in five seconds?
• 24:11
  Speaker 2: You see an aura, I think. He described her as mysterious, bright,
• 24:16
  Speaker 2: and incredibly incisive. But the key phrase he used, which
• 24:20
  Speaker 2: is fascinating from a directing standpoint, is that she possessed
• 24:23
  Speaker 2: the ability to activate a passive character.
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: And that is such a crucial screenwriting challenge. Because of
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: the nature of that Victorian cage, Lizzie Borden cannot be
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: an action hero. Right.
• 24:35
  Speaker 2: She can't be throwing punches.
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: She can't storm around the house throwing things. She is
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: financially trapped and socially immobilized. Her entire existence is about
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: swallowing her anger. So for the first few episodes, she
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: has to be almost entirely reactive to the men around her.
• 24:51
  Speaker 2: Which is very hard to play.
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: How does an actor make swallowing anger compelling for television?
• 24:57
  Speaker 2: It requires immense micro-expression. It's the tension in the jaw,
• 25:01
  Speaker 2: the stillness of the eyes, the slight hesitation before speaking.
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: The little things.
• 25:05
  Speaker 2: The audience has to see the internal pressure cooker building,
• 25:08
  Speaker 2: even when the character is simply pouring tea. If the
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: actor plays it genuinely passive, the character becomes boring. Beattie
• 25:15
  Speaker 2: apparently managed to vibrate at a frequency that conveyed immense
• 25:18
  Speaker 2: internal activity beneath a completely still surface.
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: It's the art of the simmer. Yes. But they didn't
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: just rely on new discoveries. They brought in some serious
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: heavy hitters from their established repertory company. Charlie Hunnam, who
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: famously played the horrifying serial killer Ed Gein in season three,
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: is brought back to play Andrew Borden.
• 25:38
  Speaker 2: A very familiar face for fans of the show.
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: And Vicky Creeps returns as well. I found Brennan's reasoning
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: for keeping them almost shockingly casual. He literally said they
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: just didn't want to say goodbye to them. They loved
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: working with Creeps and didn't want her to go back
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: to Germany.
• 25:53
  Speaker 2: It really highlights how Ryan Murphy operates. He builds these intense,
• 25:58
  Speaker 2: loyal theatrical troops.
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: Like American Horror Story, right?
• 26:01
  Speaker 2: Exactly. Navigating the tone of a show like Monster, which
• 26:04
  Speaker 2: constantly borders on the macabre, The campy and the profoundly
• 26:08
  Speaker 2: disturbing requires an immense amount of trust between the director
• 26:12
  Speaker 2: and the actor. When Murphy finds actors who understand that
• 26:16
  Speaker 2: specific frequency, he holds onto them tightly.
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: We also have Rebecca Hall stepping in as Abby Borden,
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: the stepmother. Brennan praised her specifically for her sharpness and
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: her ability to handle rapid-fire dialogue.
• 26:29
  Speaker 2: Oh, she's brilliant at that.
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: You can just picture the suffocating, passive-aggressive verbal sparring at
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: the Victorian dinner table. But the true wild card of
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: the casting, the element that completely shatters the Victorian claustrophobia,
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: is Sarah Paulson.
• 26:44
  Speaker 2: She is Ryan Murphy's ultimate collaborator.
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: Definitely. She enters the season in episode four to play
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: Aileen Wuornos. And Brennan describes her entrance so vividly. He
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: says she arrives right at the moment the audience thinks
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: they have the rhythm of the show figured out. and
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: she completely upends the narrative.
• 27:01
  Speaker 2: She just changes the whole energy.
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: He says she folds the whole show up and puts
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: it in her pocket. But the inclusion of Wuornos is
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: what prompted Brennan to make what is undoubtedly the most
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: controversial statement in this entire interview.
• 27:15
  Speaker 2: Yes, this is a big one.
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: The interviewer specifically asked Brennan to compare the experience of
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: writing a female serial killer to the men they had
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: focused on in the previous three seasons, Jeffrey Dahmer, the
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: Menendez brothers, and Ed Gein.
• 27:28
  Speaker 2: And Brennan's response is a massive sociological landmine.
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: It really is.
• 27:33
  Speaker 2: He claims that female killers require significantly less work to
• 27:37
  Speaker 2: make sympathetic to the audience. He argues there is a
• 27:40
  Speaker 2: built-in pathos, a pre-existing reservoir of sympathy for them.
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: Which is a bold claim.
• 27:46
  Speaker 2: He draws a direct contrast between Aileen Wuornos and Jeffrey Dahmer.
• 27:49
  Speaker 2: He says adapting Dahmer was a steeper hill to be
• 27:52
  Speaker 2: pushing a stone up. Right. But when it came to Wuornos,
• 27:54
  Speaker 2: he described her as having a, and this is a
• 27:56
  Speaker 2: direct quote, Dirtbag Charm.
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: Dirtbag Charm. Wow.
• 28:01
  Speaker 2: He went on to say, I felt like, man, this
• 28:03
  Speaker 2: woman should have her own talk show. I don't care
• 28:05
  Speaker 2: how many of her johns she killed.
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: Okay. Let's analyze the mechanics of that statement because it
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: reveals a profound bias in how society processes violence. Absolutely.
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: Why is there a built-in pathos for female killers?
• 28:19
  Speaker 2: Historically, female violence is almost overwhelmingly reactive. It is very
• 28:23
  Speaker 2: rarely predatory in the way male serial violence is. Right.
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: It's usually a response to something.
• 28:29
  Speaker 2: Exactly. Female violence is usually tied to a documented history
• 28:33
  Speaker 2: of severe victimization, profound abuse, and systemic patriarchal oppression.
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: The audience can track the math.
• 28:39
  Speaker 2: Exactly. You look at Aileen Wuornos. Her life was defined
• 28:43
  Speaker 2: by unimaginable trauma, abandonment, and horrific violence inflicted upon her
• 28:48
  Speaker 2: by men starting from a very young age, long before
• 28:51
  Speaker 2: she ever picked up a weapon.
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: It was just years and years of abuse.
• 28:54
  Speaker 2: Because the writer and the audience can draw a direct,
• 28:57
  Speaker 2: causal line from her profound victimhood to her eventual violence,
• 29:01
  Speaker 2: the violence feels comprehensible.
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: It makes sense to us.
• 29:04
  Speaker 2: We understand the mechanism of a cornered animal lashing out.
• 29:07
  Speaker 2: It allows the audience to feel empathy because the violence
• 29:10
  Speaker 2: feels rationalized by the trauma.
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: And with Dahmer.
• 29:13
  Speaker 2: Compare that to Jeffrey Dahmer. Dahmer's violence was driven by
• 29:16
  Speaker 2: deep internal psychological aberrations, necrophilia, cannibalism, that feel entirely alien
• 29:22
  Speaker 2: and predatory.
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: There's no trauma that explains that. Right.
• 29:26
  Speaker 2: There is no societal abuse that rationalizes Dahmer's actions. That
• 29:30
  Speaker 2: is the steep hill Brennan is talking about. It is
• 29:32
  Speaker 2: very hard to build an empathetic bridge to an alien psychology.
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: I understand the psychological mechanics of why we react that way.
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: But we have to vigorously challenge Brennan's actual phrasing here.
• 29:44
  Speaker 2: Oh, for sure.
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: Calling a real-life serial killer someone with dirtbag charm, saying
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: she should have her own talk show, and then casually
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: throwing out I don't care how many of her Johns
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: she killed.
• 29:56
  Speaker 2: It's very flippant.
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: Doesn't that expose the absolute most toxic element of the
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: true crime genre?
• 30:03
  Speaker 2: It is the ultimate friction point where entertainment completely overrides morality.
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: Right. Does this innate desire to find female killers sympathetic
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: because of their undeniable trauma cause us to cross a
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: massive ethical line into pure romanticization?
• 30:18
  Speaker 2: We start cheering for them.
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: Eileen Wuornos shot and killed seven men. Regardless of whether
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: they were soliciting sex... Regardless of their personal flaws, they
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: were human beings with families.
• 30:30
  Speaker 2: They were victims.
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: By reducing them to a monolithic block of johns and
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: elevating Wuornos to a charismatic, misunderstood antihero who deserves a
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: talk show, are we entirely losing our grip on the
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: reality of murder?
• 30:45
  Speaker 2: It really makes you wonder.
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: Is true crime conditioning us to only care about victims
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: if they are perfect and to forgive killers if they
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: are charismatic?
• 30:53
  Speaker 2: You are hitting on the inherent cannibalism of the true
• 30:56
  Speaker 2: crime industry here.
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: What do you mean by cannibalism?
• 30:59
  Speaker 2: To sustain a 10-hour television show, the creator must have
• 31:02
  Speaker 2: a compelling protagonist. The audience needs a reason to keep watching.
• 31:06
  Speaker 2: In adapting these stories, the writer is forced to excavate
• 31:08
  Speaker 2: the humanity within the monster.
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: They have to find something relatable.
• 31:12
  Speaker 2: But the grim reality is that elevating the humanity of
• 31:15
  Speaker 2: the killer almost inevitably requires minimizing the humanity of the victims.
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: Because if the victims are too human, we can't root
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: for the killer. Exactly.
• 31:23
  Speaker 2: The victims are reduced to plot devices. They become mere
• 31:25
  Speaker 2: props that facilitate the killer's tragic origin story. Brennan's quote
• 31:30
  Speaker 2: is shockingly blunt, perhaps offensively so, but it is a
• 31:33
  Speaker 2: highly accurate reflection of how the entertainment machine metabolizes tragedy.
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: It's just fuel for the fire.
• 31:40
  Speaker 2: The machine does not care about moral purity. It cares
• 31:42
  Speaker 2: about charisma and engagement.
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: It demands a level of self-reflection from you, the listener.
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: When you sit on your couch and consume these narratives...
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: Do you find yourself grading violence on a curve?
• 31:53
  Speaker 2: It's a tough question to ask yourself.
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: Do you forgive female subjects faster than male ones? Because
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: the narrative of historical oppression provides a convenient excuse. Does
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: learning about Victorian sexism make you root for the hatchet?
• 32:07
  Speaker 2: It is a very heavy, uncomfortable dynamic to sit with.
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: It really is.
• 32:12
  Speaker 2: But it's a dynamic that the show actively leans into
• 32:14
  Speaker 2: through its theatricality. Which is why the decision regarding Vicki
• 32:18
  Speaker 2: Creeps' casting is so brilliant structurally.
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: Oh, we have to talk about this.
• 32:22
  Speaker 2: She plays Bridget, or Maggie as she was sometimes called,
• 32:26
  Speaker 2: the Borden family's Irish immigrant servant. But Creeps also plays
• 32:29
  Speaker 2: Elizabeth Bathory in the 16th century flashbacks.
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: That blew my mind when I read it. Brennan said
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: that was a late-in-the-game inspiration from Ryan Murphy.
• 32:38
  Speaker 2: It is a stroke of structural genius because it visually
• 32:41
  Speaker 2: reinforces the show's entire thesis.
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: How so?
• 32:44
  Speaker 2: You have the exact same actress embodying the absolute lowest
• 32:48
  Speaker 2: status woman in the Borden household, a servant who is
• 32:50
  Speaker 2: practically invisible, overworked, and economically trapped.
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 32:55
  Speaker 2: And simultaneously, she embodies the highest status, most monstrously powerful
• 32:59
  Speaker 2: woman in the flashbacks. She's literally narrating her own alternate
• 33:03
  Speaker 2: persona across time.
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: That is wild.
• 33:06
  Speaker 2: It physicalizes the argument that the capacity for this extreme
• 33:09
  Speaker 2: violence and rage exists across the entire spectrum of the
• 33:12
  Speaker 2: female experience. untethered from class or era. It's an incredibly
• 33:17
  Speaker 2: sophisticated piece of visual dramaturgy.
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: And it proves that none of these choices, the casting,
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: the timelines, the plaster bones, are accidents.
• 33:25
  Speaker 2: No, they are very deliberate.
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: They are highly calibrated decisions made by a massive industrial
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: scale true crime machine. Which brings us to the staggering
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: scope of what Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan are actually building.
• 33:38
  Speaker 2: This is where it gets crazy.
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: Because season four is just a fraction of the master plan.
• 33:43
  Speaker 2: The interview reveals the true scale of the franchise. They
• 33:46
  Speaker 2: are planning to produce 10 seasons of Monster in total.
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: 10 seasons.
• 33:51
  Speaker 2: A decade-long roadmap entirely dedicated to diving into the darkest
• 33:55
  Speaker 2: psychological profiles in human history.
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: To keep that machine fed, Brennan explains their development process.
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: They operate with a constantly rotating hopper of three potential cases.
• 34:05
  Speaker 2: Just always churning.
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: They're always actively researching and toggling between three different subjects.
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: And he admits that many ideas get started... researched, and
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: then completely abandoned, just like the Mangione case.
• 34:17
  Speaker 2: Right, if they don't have that gravity.
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: The ultimate non-negotiable litmus test they apply to any potential
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: monster is a question of endurance. Can you reasonably ask
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: an audience to spend 7 to 10 hours locked inside
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: this person's head?
• 34:30
  Speaker 2: And that is the defining constraint of the serialized format.
• 34:34
  Speaker 2: If a killer's psychology is purely horrific without being complex,
• 34:37
  Speaker 2: if there is no internal conflict, no structural cage to examine,
• 34:41
  Speaker 2: no societal mirror to hold up, then the story cannot
• 34:44
  Speaker 2: sustain 10 hours.
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: It would just be a grueling, unwatchable snuff film. Exactly.
• 34:48
  Speaker 2: The subject must possess enough psychological depth. or at least
• 34:52
  Speaker 2: enough historical ambiguity to allow the writers to build a
• 34:55
  Speaker 2: compelling narrative scaffolding around them.
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: And speaking of the writers, what Brennan says about the
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: actual physical process of writing these dark scripts is totally counterintuitive.
• 35:05
  Speaker 2: It really is.
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: You would assume that spending 12 hours a day researching
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: axe murders, systemic abuse, and serial killings would take a massive,
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: debilitating psychological toll on a writer.
• 35:16
  Speaker 2: I mean, I would think so.
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: But Brennan claims the exact opposite. He describes the process
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: of writing true crime as effortless. He says it is
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: highly enjoyable work.
• 35:26
  Speaker 2: It sounds jarring, but from a purely mechanical screenwriting perspective,
• 35:30
  Speaker 2: his reasoning is entirely sound.
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: How so? How can writing about real-life slaughter be effortless?
• 35:35
  Speaker 2: Because the hardest part of writing is the blank page.
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: Oh, sure.
• 35:39
  Speaker 2: Total creative freedom is paralyzing. When you create an original
• 35:43
  Speaker 2: fiction show, you are the architect of the universe. You
• 35:46
  Speaker 2: have to invent the physics of the world. the backstory
• 35:48
  Speaker 2: of every character, the rules of the society, and engineer
• 35:51
  Speaker 2: a plot that makes logical sense.
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: That sounds exhausting.
• 35:54
  Speaker 2: It is exhausting, laborious work. But true crime eliminates the
• 35:58
  Speaker 2: blank page. History hands you the scaffolding.
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: Ah, I see.
• 36:02
  Speaker 2: The dates are set. The locations are fixed. The gruesome
• 36:05
  Speaker 2: climax is already written in the police reports. The writer's
• 36:08
  Speaker 2: job shifts from being an architect to being an interior decorator.
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: An interior decorator for a murder house.
• 36:15
  Speaker 2: Basically, yeah. The structure is built. You just have to
• 36:18
  Speaker 2: walk through the rooms and decide what emotional color to
• 36:21
  Speaker 2: paint the walls. You are curating reality rather than inventing
• 36:25
  Speaker 2: it from whole cloth. There is an immense freedom to
• 36:28
  Speaker 2: be found inside the strict cage of historical facts.
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: Oh, that makes perfect sense. It's exactly like a coloring book.
• 36:34
  Speaker 2: A coloring book.
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah. If someone sits you down in front of a
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: terrifyingly blank, massive white canvas and says, paint a masterpiece.
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: You freeze. You don't know where to start. Right. But
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: true crime is a coloring book. Reality has already drawn
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: the bold, unchangeable black outlines of the drawing. The writer
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: just gets to open their box of crayons and focus
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: entirely on the shading.
• 36:56
  Speaker 2: That's a great analogy.
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: Do we color the Victorian parlor in dark, oppressive tones?
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: Do we give the serial killer a bright, charismatic hue?
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: The heavy lifting of the structure is done. which makes
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: the creative process vastly faster and, strangely, as Brennan notes,
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: almost relaxing for the creator.
• 37:14
  Speaker 2: However, as they look toward completing this massive 10-season quota,
• 37:18
  Speaker 2: and we know Brennan is already pivoting to his next
• 37:21
  Speaker 2: immediate project, The Watcher Season 2, which he is keeping
• 37:24
  Speaker 2: very tight-lipped about, we have to seriously question the long-term
• 37:28
  Speaker 2: viability of the coloring book approach.
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: That is my biggest lingering concern with this master plan.
• 37:34
  Speaker 2: What happens when the hopper runs dry?
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: Exactly. If they are contractually or creatively obligated to generate
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: 10 distinct 10-hour seasons, are they eventually going to run
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: out of subjects that genuinely warrant that level of exploration?
• 37:49
  Speaker 2: It's highly likely.
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: We saw them have the good sense to abandon the
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: Mangione case because it wasn't right. But what happens when
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: we get to season eight or nine? Are we going
• 37:59
  Speaker 1: to see a scraping the bottom of the barrel effect?
• 38:03
  Speaker 2: Will they start forcing cases into the hopper that lack
• 38:05
  Speaker 2: that necessary complexity?
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: Right. And if they do, will they be forced to
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: invent so much plaster to fill out the dinosaur skeleton
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: that it ceases to be true crime entirely? It just
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: devolves into pure fiction wearing a historical mask.
• 38:19
  Speaker 2: That is the inherent danger of industrializing the true crime genre.
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: It becomes an assembly line.
• 38:25
  Speaker 2: When you commit to a quota, you risk elevating mediocre, senseless,
• 38:30
  Speaker 2: or purely tragic events to the level of modern myth
• 38:33
  Speaker 2: simply because the content machine needs to be fed.
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: The beast must eat.
• 38:37
  Speaker 2: The cultural demand for the monster might eventually outpace the
• 38:42
  Speaker 2: historical supply of truly compelling, justifiable narratives.
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: It is a massive undertaking, and this conversation has completely
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: reshaped how I view it. We covered some incredible ground today.
• 38:54
  Speaker 2: We really did.
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: We started by looking at how abandoning a modern CEO
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: murder led the creators to a deep cross-century exploration of
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: Victorian repression and systemic female confinement.
• 39:06
  Speaker 2: From Mangione to Bathory.
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: We unpacked the meticulous casting of actors like Ella Beatty,
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: the theatrical genius of Vicky Creep's dual role, and the
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: deeply controversial mechanisms of sympathy surrounding Sarah Paulson's Eileen Wuornos.
• 39:20
  Speaker 2: And that dirtbag charm quote.
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: Yes, that quote. And finally, we looked at the massive
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: 10-season industrial machine that operates by treating dark history like
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: a psychoanalysis. coloring book.
• 39:32
  Speaker 2: I want to thank you, the listener, for joining us
• 39:34
  Speaker 2: on this incredibly deep dive today.
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: Yes, thank you for being here.
• 39:39
  Speaker 2: Understanding the invisible architecture of these shows, understanding the inherent
• 39:42
  Speaker 2: biases of the showrunners, the structural constraints of television, and
• 39:46
  Speaker 2: the vast amounts of plaster used to fill the historical
• 39:49
  Speaker 2: gaps— It completely transforms the viewing experience.
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: It changes everything.
• 39:53
  Speaker 2: You are no longer passively absorbing a historical recap. You
• 39:57
  Speaker 2: are actively engaging with a highly calculated, heavily produced argument
• 40:01
  Speaker 2: about the nature of humanity.
• 40:03
  Speaker 1: You are watching the strings being pulled, and you know
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: exactly who is pulling them. Exactly. And as we wrap up,
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: I want to leave you with one final lingering thought
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: to mull over on your own time. Throughout this hour,
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: we've discussed how creators like Ian Brennan actively project modern
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: 21st century themes like our current sociological discourse on female
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: rage and systemic confinement backward into historical figures like lizzie
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: borden right so the question i want you to ask
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: yourself is this when we binge these massive true crime
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: adaptations are we actually learning anything truthful about the killers of.
• 40:40
  Speaker 2: The past or is it something else entirely.
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: Or has the true crime genre simply evolved into a dark,
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: highly entertaining funhouse mirror, reflecting exactly what we want to
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: see about our own modern anxieties?
• 40:53
  Speaker 2: That is a chilling thought.
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: Have the showrunners broken into the museum, rearranged the bones,
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: and shaped them to look exactly like us? It is
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: definitely something to think about the next time you hit play.
• 41:06
  Speaker 2: For sure.
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: Thank you for listening, and we invite you to bring
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: your next stack of sources for our next deep dive. Goodbye.