The teaser for Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story opens with a family portrait and a smiling Kitty Menendez, played by Chloë Sevigny, asking her husband José (Javier Bardem) with a quiet remark: "I need to know what’s going on with you and boys."
Newcomers Nicholas Alexander Chavez and Cooper Koch, portraying brothers Lyle and Erik, respectively, stand silently, their own smiles cast over their parents' shoulders in the background. "It is over. Stop. I’m going to fix this family," José replies before he and his wife stand up and leave the photo shoot.
During their original trial in 1993 for the murder of their parents, the Menendez brothers claimed they shot José and Kitty Menendez in self-defense after years of sexual abuse by their father and with their mother's knowledge. The teaser ends with the Menendez brothers in an embrace.
"Now it's just the two of us," one brother tells the other.
The second season of Monsters has a synopsis that reads as follows: "While the prosecution argued they were seeking to inherit their family fortune, the brothers claimed – and remain adamant to this day, as they serve life sentences without the possibility of parole – that their actions stemmed out of fear from a lifetime of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse at the hands of their parents.
Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story dives into the historic case that took the world by storm, paved the way for audiences' modern-day fascination with true crime, and in return asks those audiences: Who are the real monsters?"
The second season also features Nathan Lane, who plays investigative journalist Dominick Dunne, and Ari Graynor as criminal defense attorney Leslie Abramson. The Menendez case was a media sensation in the early '90s, and Monsters is the most recent to adapt the story for the screen.
Fox and CBS aired television movies about the 1994 murders, Lifetime released Menendez: Blood Brothers in 2017, and NBC's Law & Order: True Crime also covered the case, starring Edie Falco as Abramson. The 2023 Peacock documentary Menendez + Menudo: Boys Betrayed centered on Roy Rosselló, a former member of the boy band Menudo, who alleges that José Menendez sexually abused him when he was a teenager.
