Monster’s showrunner explains the frustrating reason he invented half of The Lizzie Borden Story

Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is far from historically accurate, but that was by design, showrunner Ian Brennan has confirmed. 

Though none of us expected a Ryan Murphy production to stick to the facts, The Lizzie Borden Story really went hard and fast with the historical inaccuracies. Perhaps the most egregious example was painting axe murder victim Abby Borden as an abusive, vile woman. Simply put, it would be easier to point out what the show got right than what it got wrong. 

In an interview with The Wrap earlier this month, showrunner Ian Brennan admitted: “To start with, I didn’t know very much about [Lizzie Borden] at all. I’d never seen any of the movies or TV shows. I didn’t really know anything beyond the nursery rhyme. Honestly, I didn’t know she wasn’t convicted, so it was really a tabula rasa for me.”

Not off to a great start there, but it gets worse. 

There’s a reason half of The Lizzie Borden Story is false 

Credit: Netflix

Later, when answering the same question, Ian Brennan shared a bit of the process of putting The Lizzie Borden Story together. There, he admitted that Lizzie’s story is a little bare. 

“In each one of these seasons, we go further back into the past, and it’s trickier to know what’s even knowable. But if you just tell the facts of what is known to be true, that in and of itself isn’t really a full story because it’s full of gaps,” he explained.

“So in order to tell the story responsibly and in an interesting way, you have to take what is knowable — which is full of a lot of mistruths or half truths, a lot of lies — and you have to holistically look at them all.”

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Rather than pick someone else with a more substantial and accurate story, his team soldiered on with Lizzie Borden in mind. Naturally, they were left to fill in the “gaps” themselves. 

Credit: Netflix

“Then you go in the writers’ room, look at one another squarely and be like, ‘OK, what do we think really happened here?’ This is less of a flight of fancy than a hunch about what went down in the [Borden] house and also what it would have felt like to be that woman in that house. It was really leading with the gut, and I think that’s where the [anachronistic] music came from,” he added. 

Admittedly, what we factually know about the Lizzie Borden case is sketchy at best. But still, I don’t understand how he got “lesbian affair with the maid” from the information already out there. Make it make sense. 

“It’s easy for period things to feel stuffy, and everything’s on a harpsichord, which is totally great. But I think that’s just like not quite the story here,” he added. 

Long story short: The Lizzie Borden case couldn’t stand by itself, hence the inclusion of other serial killer women and invented facts. 

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Featured image credit: Netflix