‘Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendez’ further confirms the fascination with serial killers, but it does not reach the level of this series by David Fincher.
Ryan Murphy, the creator of series like ‘American Horror Story,’ ‘Glee,’ and ‘Feud,’ has returned to Netflix with the second season of ‘Monster,’ his anthology work on the true stories of the most notorious serial killers in U.S. history. The first season, ‘Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story,’ reached one billion hours of viewing in its first 60 days, becoming the third most popular English-language series in Netflix’s history. Season 2, ‘Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendez,’ has just arrived in Netflix’s catalog, narrating the case of two brothers convicted in 1996 for the murders of their parents, José (Javier Bardem) and Mary Louise “Kitty” Menendez. And season 3 of ‘Monster’ is already on the way, focused on Ed Gein, the criminal who inspired films like ‘The Silence of the Lambs,’ ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,’ and ‘Psycho.’
The success of ‘Monster’ on Netflix shows that true crime stories and documentaries are more popular than ever, and we have proof of this across all streaming platforms and in movie theaters: ‘How to Catch a Monster’ on Prime Video, ‘The Sancho Case’ on Max, ‘Longlegs’ (based on a chilling true story) in theaters… But, while most of these productions focus on the criminal as the main character, there is a series on Netflix that shifts the perspective by focusing on the investigators behind the cases that uncover these crimes, which was even better received by critics and audiences. Unjustly canceled by the platform after two seasons, ‘Mindhunter’ puts us on the trail of the most disturbing and twisted serial killers in American history.
As he did in ‘Seven’ and ‘Zodiac’ (and contrary to what was proposed in ‘The Killer’), David Fincher focuses on a group of detectives on the hunt, this time not for one but several serial killers, from Ed Kemper to Charles Manson. ‘Mindhunter’ follows Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) and Bill Tench (Holt McCallany), two FBI agents who develop new investigative techniques to discover a common pattern that allows them to catch serial killers and psychopathic minds. Over its two seasons and nineteen episodes, we see how the protagonists, accompanied by Dr. Wendy Carr (Anna Torv), head of the psychology department at Boston University, begin to interview and analyze the profiles of some of the most well-known American serial killers of the late 20th century.
If you love gruesome stories and the police genre, and you’ve just finished watching ‘Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendez’ and are craving more, ‘Mindhunter’ is perfect for you. The bad news? Netflix canceled it after just 2 seasons. Fincher himself justified the decision, admitting, “It’s a particularly expensive series and, as far as Netflix is concerned, we weren’t able to attract an audience level that justified such an investment. One way or another, you have to think that dollars need to equal eyes watching the show. I don’t blame them; they took enough risks distributing it.”
