Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story Dominates Netflix Streaming Charts

The Monster machine rolls on. Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan's true-crime anthology is dominating Netflix once again, as Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story debuted at No. 1 on the platform's global English TV list and — according to reports — held the top spot for a second consecutive week. In an era of fractured attention, the anthology remains one of the few reliable event-television plays left on streaming.

The Numbers

The eight-episode season premiered on September 17 and pulled 12.1 million views in its chart week of September 14–20, racking up 80.1 million hours watched. That debut puts it squarely in line with the franchise's recent heavy hitters: The Ed Gein Story opened with 12.2 million views in 2025, and The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story opened with 12.3 million in 2024. Only the original Jeffrey Dahmer season sits clearly above, with 22.3 million views in its first four days back in 2022 — still good enough for No. 7 on Netflix's all-time English-language TV list.

Even better for Netflix: the show reportedly grew its audience in week two, with viewership up roughly 20% week over week and total views climbing past 14.5 million in less than two weeks of release. Across all four seasons, the Monster franchise has now reached nearly 170 million views, according to reports.

A First for the Franchise

The Lizzie Borden Story is a milestone installment: it's the first season of the anthology to center on an alleged female perpetrator, and it reaches further back in time than any previous chapter. Ella Beatty stars as Lizzie Borden, the woman accused — and acquitted — of the 1892 axe murders of her father and stepmother in Fall River, Massachusetts. The cast also includes Charlie Hunnam, Rebecca Hall, Vicky Krieps, Jessica Barden, Billie Lourd, and Sarah Paulson as serial killer Aileen Wuornos.

Creator Ian Brennan has described the season as an exploration of misogyny, gender roles, and the expectations placed on Victorian-era women, with class and sexuality threaded through Borden's relationship with housemaid Bridget Sullivan. It's also the first Monster season built around a subject who was acquitted — a legal ambiguity that has fueled more than a century of debate, and now, a fresh wave of it online.

Divided Critics, Devoted Viewers

As with every Monster installment, the critical reception has been polarized — review aggregators show a deeply divided response — but the audience has shown up anyway, which has been the franchise's defining pattern since Dahmer. Murphy and Brennan have said the anthology could run for at least ten seasons, with figures like Dennis Rader, Gary Ridgway, and Ted Bundy floated as possible future subjects. Given the numbers Lizzie Borden is putting up, it's hard to imagine Netflix saying no.