Ryan Murphy thinks the Menendez brothers should ‘send me flowers’

Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story hit Netflix and is telling the story of the Menendez brothers. The issue is that both Lyle and Erik Menendez are still alive and not particularly happy with the series. Creator Ryan Murphy thinks they should be thanking him.

Murphy did an interview with The Hollywood Reporter about the show and talked about how the series itself was being received. When asked whether or not the show ended up being the vision that he and co-creator Ian Brennan wanted, Murphy said yes but took it one step further. He shared his thoughts on the Menendez brothers and they are as bad as you probably think his comments would be.

“Yes, 100 percent. Ian [Brennan, co-creator] and I set out to do exactly what we wanted to do. And I’ll tell you my thoughts about the Menendez brothers,” Murphy said. It then ushered in an incredibly misguided comment about how the brothers should be treating the show. He thinks that they owe him thanks for getting them back in the news.

“The Menendez brothers should be sending me flowers. They haven’t had so much attention in 30 years. And it’s gotten the attention of not only this country, but all over the world. There’s sort of an outpouring of interest in their lives and in the case. I know for a fact that many people have offered to help them because of the interest of my show and what we did. There is no world that we live in where the Menendez brothers or their wives or lawyers would say, ‘You know what, that was a wonderful, accurate depiction of our clients.’ That was never going to happen, and I wasn’t interested in that happening.”

Telling someone to send you flowers for using their story is wild

Erik Menendez has released statements about the show along the rest of his family (via social media). The Menendez family called the series “a phobic, gross, anachronistic, serial episodic nightmare that is not only riddled with mistruths and outright falsehoods but ignores the most recent exculpatory.”

Murphy did push back at Erik Menendez’s comments on the show, claiming that Erik Menendez has not watched the show. Frankly, that doesn’t matter. If the subject of your series doesn’t like your point of view, that should be enough. Still, Murphy responded to Menendez’s comments saying he hopes that he watches the show.

“I think that’s interesting because I know he hasn’t watched the show. So I find that curious,” Murphy told E! News in a red carpet interview Monday for Grotesquerie. “I hope he does watch it. I think if he did watch it he would be incredibly proud of Cooper Koch who plays him.”

I understand the creative push to protect your show. I really do. You want to be supportive of what you created but you also need to honor the subjects of it. These are real people who are alive and have real opinions. If Murphy didn’t want to deal with what the Menendez brothers thought, he shouldn’t have done a series about them.