For 35 minutes in the middle of Netflix’s nine-episode series Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendez does something special.

The fifth chapter, titled “The Hurt Man,” was written by series co-creator Ian Brennan and directed by Michael Uppendahl. It’s a one-shot conversation between Erik Menendez (Cooper Koch) and his attorney Leslie Abramson (Ari Graynor). The camera starts a few feet behind Abramson and moves in on Erik as he recalls his history of sexual abuse at the hands of his tyrannical father, José (Javier Bardem).

It’s a stunt, but the whole show is a stunt, so why nitpick? The writing is precise, uncomfortably explicit, and haunting. The formal simplicity serves its purpose, building breathtaking tension and spotlighting Koch, who lays himself bare emotionally. We see the impact of the purging of these memories on Erik, and because we can’t see Abramson’s face, we hear her voice revealing her even more.

Viewers should be as shocked by this story as Abramson is, but the drama also leaves a shadow of doubt about the veracity of the nightmarish memory. Erik, as we have been told before and will be told many more times, was an aspiring actor who once proved his credibility with an impassioned Shakespearean monologue. There is no concrete suggestion that Erik is lying, but if you are inclined to see him as a master manipulator, this segment will not deter you.

Everything Monsters seemingly wants to do — balancing layers of skepticism and a desire for empathy — is captured in that one exceptional episode and, maddeningly, only in brief moments and performances elsewhere. In many ways, it’s similar to how Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Storyalso created by Brennan and Ryan Murphy, claimed not to be an exploitative portrayal of the notorious serial killer, but only really showed something other than voyeuristic staring midway through the season with “Silenced” and “Cassandra.” Most of the rest of that series was well-acted trash.

I don’t think so Monsters is just as openly vulgar as SampleBut it is unjustifiably long at nine hours and ends with two chapters that are poorly structured, thematically flat and much, much more one-sided in their approach to the Menendez brothers, their overt victimhood and guilt than was convincing.

For those who don’t remember the case or the 2017 NBC miniseries Law and order true crime or any of the other countless documentaries and news magazines about it: In 1989, Live Entertainment CEO José Menendez and his wife Kitty (Chloë Sevigny) were brutally murdered in their Beverly Hills home. Sons Lyle (Nicholas Alexander Chavez) and Erik initially claimed they had returned to the bloody crime scene, and pointed the finger at a possible mob hit.

Under bizarre circumstances involving their possibly unlicensed psychologist (Dallas Roberts’ Dr. Oziel), the brothers confessed to the murders. Under even more bizarre circumstances involving Oziel’s crystal-loving mistress (Leslie Grossman’s Judalon), the confessions became public knowledge. The Menendez brothers were arrested and became world-wide notorious.

The media circus surrounding the brothers, the crime and their trial erupted when Erik and Lyle claimed that they had been abused and sexually assaulted by their father, that they had killed him to protect their own lives and that they had killed their mother because of her complicity.

When it comes to trials of the century, it was OJ before OJ took over. In fact, the football star turned accused murderer plays a bit part as part of the show’s wholly ineffective attempt to make some kind of general observation about law and order in ’90s Los Angeles. Simply naming OJ Simpson, the Menendez brothers, Rodney King, and Zsa Zsa Gabor, however, doesn’t quite add up to a meaningful thesis. Monsters does a much better job of dealing with the cheesy pop culture of the time, with Reebok Pumps, Milli Vanilli and an anachronistic Vanilla Ice montage playing a key role.

Murphy probably shouldn’t have gotten so close to Earth’s vast geographic and temporal proximity. The People vs. OJ Simpson: American Crime Story — and indeed, the two shows have a lot of overlap, all of which is to their advantage American crime story.

But what’s honestly even more confusing is how Netflix’s Ryan Murphy and FX’s Ryan Murphy made it so Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendez And American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez premiering within two days of each other. Placed directly next to each other, these two dramas about the intersection of wealth, celebrity, murder, and sexual abuse (with undertones tied to repressed homosexuality) offer similar attempts at structural flexibility, similar sneaky approaches to their doomed, impressively ripped antiheroes, and similar bloated running times of the kind that only someone with Murphy’s influence could get away with.

The best thing I can say about this double release is that watching Monsters gave me more appreciation for American sports storywith his scathing critique of the way the NCAA and NFL harness the aggression of young men, profit from it, and then spew the men and their violence back into society.

Monsters is less nuanced. It often becomes a crude stretch of credulity that, depending on the moment, risks glossing over two brutal deaths or a decade of sexual assault, all in the name of rehashing a case that’s been rehashed many times over the years. I think it’s possible to make a series with this title and treat the identity of the actual eponymous monsters as something ambiguous and interchangeable. In fact, I think “The Hurt Man” does a good job, and the two episodes surrounding it — the Paris Barclay-directed “Kill or Be Killed” and the Max Winkler-directed “Don’t Dream It’s Over” — have beats that will leave viewers feeling quite conflicted. The more clunky opening and closing sections, however, work neither as exercises in complex storytelling nor as historical mysteries.

Mostly, Monsters just try to have both — or more than two “ways.” Are the monsters the brothers? The parents? Are we the monsters because we obsess over these things? Are reporters and storytellers like Dominick Dunne, played well by Nathan Lane, the monsters because they feed off these stories and too often dehumanize those involved, even when they know better?

And where does that put Ryan Murphy and his frequent collaborators, who produce so many stories of this type that overlap is inevitable and future topics are already planned for years to come? I don’t think so Monsters does not struggle with his own complicity at all, and is much weaker for that lack of introspection.

At least the acting is good?

Bardem is terrifying in a performance that’s wildly oversized but subtle enough to make his weeping patriarch both a chilling villain and a victim himself — perhaps a mere cog in a cycle of abuse that may represent the saga’s deepest tragedy. I don’t think the show fully “gets” Kitty, but in Sevigny’s inscrutable interpretation, that’s part of the point. Kitty has become a footnote in a terrible history, and that, at least, feels sad.

Chavez is the more volcanic of the two title brothers, playing Lyle with an intensity that sometimes leaps off the screen, sometimes in ways that are intentionally funny. But Koch is the real revelation, and “The Hurt Man” should have him in line for an Emmy nomination next summer.

I also really liked Graynor, whose mounting frustration and growing insecurity as the case dragged on became one of the few things I really appreciated about the latter installments. If anything, she’s a much more natural as a curly-haired lawyer named “Abramson” than Edie Falco was in the NBC mini.

Over nine exhausting hours (and I’m not just saying that because I watched the entire season in one day, since no screeners were provided to critics), Monsters raises a lot of provocative issues. But ultimately it boils down to “often it’s hard to know the truth,” illustrating his point by staging and re-staging key moments in the timeline. I get it. I just don’t think it’s done smartly or in a way that provides enlightenment.

As Lyle’s attorney, played by Jess Weixler, notes of her client, “It’s not that I don’t believe those stories are true. It’s like I don’t believe them the way he tells them.”