While Lizzie Borden remains a familiar name in American folklore, her story has long crossed from true crime into legend — retold, reimagined, and romanticized to the point where fact and fiction blur. Countless adaptations, from films to stage plays to pop-culture references, have already cemented her case in public consciousness. What once shocked the world has become a mythic rhyme — “Lizzie Borden took an axe…” — stripped of its psychological depth and historical freshness.

The MONSTER series was never meant to simply re-stage famous crimes; it was created to deconstruct them — to examine what makes a person cross the threshold of humanity and into monstrosity. Dahmer’s season succeeded not because of the gore or notoriety, but because it humanized horror without justifying it. It gave insight into isolation, compulsion, and the terrifying banality of evil.

By contrast, Lizzie Borden’s story offers little psychological complexity or modern relevance. The historical ambiguity of her guilt, while intriguing, prevents the kind of intimate psychological exploration that defines MONSTER. There are no surviving interviews, no first-hand accounts of inner conflict, no verifiable psychological profile to dissect. What remains is mostly speculation and myth — fascinating as folklore, but shallow as psychological study.

Figures like Ed Kemper, however, represent the essence of what makes MONSTER so gripping: intelligence warped by pathology, a mind that both repels and fascinates. His articulate reflections on his own crimes, his unnerving self-awareness, and his ability to verbalize his motivations make him a rare subject whose darkness can be understood rather than merely witnessed. Exploring his story would not just disturb — it would illuminate.

Netflix has a rare opportunity to continue MONSTER as a thoughtful, provocative study of deviance, not a rehash of overfamiliar legend. Choosing a figure like Ed Kemper would honor the series’ original promise: to confront the audience not just with evil, but with understanding.

Fans of the series urge Netflix and Ryan Murphy to reconsider — to move beyond overexposed historical myths and instead pursue stories that reveal, in raw and unflinching detail, the terrifying intricacies of the human mind.