For 35 minutes in the middle of the nine-part series Monster: 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 is a one-shot conversation between Erik Menendez (Cooper Koch) and his lawyer Leslie Abramson (Ari Graynor). The camera begins a few feet behind Abramson and slowly approaches Erik as he recalls his past as a sexually abused person by his tyrannical father José (Javier Bardem).

It’s a stunt, but the whole show is a stunt, so why be petty? The script is precise, uncomfortably explicit and haunting. The formal simplicity serves its purpose, building breathless tension and putting the spotlight on Koch, who exposes himself emotionally. We see the effect the erasure of those memories has on Erik, and since we can’t see Abramson’s face, we hear through her voice that she is even more moved.

Viewers are meant to be as shocked by this account as Abramson, but the drama also casts some doubt on the veracity of the nightmarish memory. Erik, as we’ve already been told and as we’ll hear many more times, was an aspiring actor who once proved his credibility with an impassioned Shakespeare monologue. There’s no concrete indication that Erik is lying, but if you’re inclined to think he’s a master manipulator, this section won’t dissuade you.

Everything Monster supposedly wants to do – balancing skepticism with the yearning for empathy – is captured in this one extraordinary episode and, annoyingly, only in brief moments and appearances elsewhere. In many ways, it is similar to Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Storyalso by Brennan and Ryan Murphy, ostensibly didn’t want to be an exploitative portrait of the notorious serial killer, but only showed anything more than voyeuristic gawking in the middle of the season with “Silenced” and “Cassandra.” Most of the rest of the series was well-acted trash.

I don’t believe Monster is as blatantly trashy as Monster. But it is unreasonably long at nine hours, and ends with two chapters that are poorly structured, thematically flat, and far, far more one-sided in their approach to the Menendez brothers, their professed victimhood and guilt, than seemed convincing.

For those who don’t remember the case or the 2017 NBC miniseries Law & Order – True Crime or any of the countless other documentaries and news magazine reports about it: In 1989, José Menendez, CEO of Live Entertainment, and his wife Kitty (Chloë Sevigny) were brutally murdered in their Beverly Hills mansion. Sons Lyle (Nicholas Alexander Chavez) and Erik initially claimed they returned home and found the bloody crime scene, suggesting a possible mafia murder.

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

The media frenzy surrounding the brothers, the crime, and their trial exploded due to Erik and Lyle’s claims that they were abused and sexually abused by their father and killed him to protect their own lives and their mother for her complicity.

As far as trials of the century go, it was OJ before OJ easily displaced him. In fact, the football star turned suspected murderer plays only a small role in the show’s entirely ineffective attempt to make some kind of comprehensive observation about law and order in 1990s Los Angeles. But simply mentioning the names of OJ Simpson, the Menendez brothers, Rodney King and Zsa Zsa Gabor is not the same as developing a meaningful thesis. Monster does a much better job of dealing with the cheap pop culture kitsch of the era, with Reebok pumps, Milli Vanilli, and an anachronistic Vanilla Ice montage playing key roles.

Murphy probably would not have been so close geographically and temporally to the enormous The People v. OJ Simpson: American Crime Story — and indeed there are many overlaps between the two shows, all of which American crime history.

But what is even more confusing, frankly, is how Ryan Murphy of Netflix and Ryan Murphy of FX allowed Monster: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendez And American Sports History: Aaron Hernandez premiere two days apart. Presented right next to each other, these two dramas about the intersection of wealth, celebrity, murder, and sexual abuse (with undertones related to repressed homosexuality) offer similar attempts at structural flexibility, similarly prurient approaches to their doomed, impressively muscular antiheroes, and similarly bloated running times that only someone with Murphy’s influence could get away with.

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

Monster is less nuanced. It often becomes a gross faltering of credibility that, depending on the moment, risks trivializing either two brutal deaths or a decade of harassment, all in the name of rehashing a case that’s been rehashed plenty over the years. I think it’s possible to make a show with that title and treat the identities of the actual eponymous monsters as something ambiguous and interchangeable. In fact, I think The Hurt Man does that well, and the two episodes surrounding it – “Kill or Be Killed,” directed by Paris Barclay, and “Don’t Dream It’s Over,” directed by Max Winkler – have a rhythm that leaves viewers properly torn. The clunkier opening and closing scenes, however, don’t work as exercises in complex storytelling, nor as historical crime thrillers.

Mostly, Monster I’m just trying to have it both ways – or more than two “ways”, really. Are the brothers the monsters? The parents? Are we the monsters because we obsess over cases like this? Are reporters and storytellers like Dominick Dunne, played well by Nathan Lane, the monsters because they feed off these narratives and too often dehumanize the people involved, even when they know better?

And where do Ryan Murphy and his frequent collaborators stand, who produce so many stories of this kind that overlaps are inevitable and future themes are already planned for the next few years? I don’t think Monster does not confront his own guilt at all and is all the weaker because of this lack of self-observation.

At least the acting is good?

Bardem is terrifying in a grossly over-the-top performance, but offers enough subtlety to portray his howling patriarch as both a gruesome villain and a victim—perhaps just a cog in a cycle of abuse that may represent the saga’s deepest tragedy. I don’t think the show “gets” Kitty at all, but in Sevigny’s inscrutable interpretation, that’s part of the problem. Kitty has become a footnote in a terrible story, and that’s sad, to say the least.

Chavez is the more temperamental of the two titular brothers, and plays Lyle with an intensity that sometimes bursts off the screen, other times in a deliberately comical way. But Koch is the real revelation, and “The Hurt Man” should earn him an Emmy nomination next summer.

I also really liked Graynor, whose increasing frustration and uncertainty as the case drags on is one of the few things I’ve really appreciated about the final installments. At least she’s much more natural as a curly-haired lawyer named “Abramson” than Edie Falco was in the NBC miniseries.

Over nine tiring hours (and I’m not just saying that because I watched the entire season in one day, as no screeners were provided to critics), Monster raises a lot of provocative questions. But ultimately it just concludes, “It’s often hard to know the truth,” and illustrates its point by staging and re-staging key moments in the timeline. I get it. I just don’t think it’s done cleverly or in a way that’s insightful.

Lyle’s lawyer, played by Jess Weixler, says of her client: “It’s not that I don’t believe these stories are true. It’s more that I don’t believe them the way he tells them.”