Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Sitting for a portrait in 1988, the Menendez family seem the picture of American affluence and aspiration. In the centre of the image, the patriarch José, a Cuban immigrant who built a fortune in the entertainment industry, beams next to his wife of 25 years, Kitty. Flanking them on either side are brothers Lyle and Erik, a Princeton student and tennis prodigy respectively. But about a year later, there would be a shooting at the family’s Beverly Hills mansion. The parents, the two victims; the killers, their sons. Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, the second instalment in Netflix’s true crime anthology, Monster, revisits this chilling case and the ensuing high-profile trials which resulted in life convictions for both brothers in 1996. Co-created by Ryan Murphy, the nine-part series largely finds the prolific showrunner sticking to his distinctive, if divisive, MO of combining ghoulish detail with glossy production.More effective is the way the show plays with our perceptions of who the “monsters” are here. While the first couple of chapters introduce us to an ostensible short-fused sociopath in Lyle (Nicholas Alexander Chavez) and emotionally inarticulate teen in Erik (Cooper Koch), the episodes that follow the brothers’ eventual arrest sheds new light on the crime. Or rather, they plunge us into the abysmal darkness of a life lived in the shadow of a father who allegedly bullied, beat and raped his sons, and a mother who supposedly knew everything and said nothing.In flashbacks, Javier Bardem terrifies as José — not just in explosive outbursts, but in moments which hint at fathomless cruelty and rage below the surface — while Chloë Sevigny gives a disquieting sense of Kitty as a woman numbed by depression and unstinting devotion to her husband. But the series is never more powerful than in its fifth episode, in which Erik opens up to his lawyer (Ari Graynor) about the abuse he suffered and the shame and helplessness that followed. Here Murphy eschews all his gimmicks and simply places a camera in front of Koch for 35 uninterrupted minutes.Monsters proves itself capable of confronting a complex case with sensitivity — which makes its increasing sensationalism and salaciousness all the more frustrating. There is a dissatisfying irony too about the presence of a journalist character (played by Nathan Lane) regaling friends with grisly details of the killing. Look at how this vulture revels in the awful tragedy, the show says, as if it weren’t doing the same thing with every bit of gratuitous gore and every superfluous minute that strains to stretch this bleak story into a sprawling TV saga.★★★☆☆On Netflix now
