There’s a pulp fiction quality to Ryan Murphy’s “Monster,” particularly in its new season devoted to Lizzie Borden (Ella Beatty, daughter of Annette Bening and Warren Beatty).
It’s not just Lizzie’s murder of her stepmother Abby (Rebecca Hall, “Iron Man 3”) and her father Andrew (Charlie Hunnam, “Monster: The Ed Gein Story”), an event that occurs early in the first episode that also squeezes in two renditions of the dark nursery rhyme, “Lizzie Borden took an axe/Gave her mother 40 whacks.”
After the bloodletting, “Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story” flashes back four months, which is where the show gets especially juicy with pulp.
In this fictional iteration of the tale, viewers see just how poorly Lizzie gets treated by her stepmother. In a style familiar to anyone who’s watched a Ryan Murphy-executive-produced series, Abby isn’t just cold and emotionally abusive in her treatment of Lizzie and the household staff, she’s hilariously awful.
When advising Lizzie on how to interact with a gentleman caller, Abby says, “Don’t burden him with your opinions, because yours are shallow and off-putting.”
In the next breath, the stepmonster refers to Lizzie as having “turgid little sausage fingers.”
Now streaming its eight-episode season, “Monster: Lizzie Borden” wastes no time introducing a maid, Bridget Sullivan (Vicky Krieps), who joins the Borden household and begins to give Lizzie ideas about how poorly she’s being treated. At the same time, Bridget creates chaos elsewhere in the residence, including through blackmail.
Through two episodes made available for review, pretty much every character in the series, with the possible exception of Lizzie, behaves like a lunatic with performances amped to “off the charts” levels. Don’t get me started on the vomit-filled second episode that leaves nothing to the imagination. This edition of “Monster” is a crime story played for…