Monster's Lizzie Borden Season Is Netflix's No. 1 - But the Numbers Tell a Different Story

Forget the No. 1 badge for a moment. Ryan Murphy's Monster is showing its first real cracks - and the evidence is hiding inside a victory lap. Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story just held the top spot on Netflix's English TV chart for a second straight week with 14.5 million views, up 20 percent from its debut. By any normal measure, that is a smash. By Monster's own impossible standards, it is the weakest second week the franchise has ever had.

The numbers tell the story. The Lizzie Borden season opened September 17 with 12.1 million views and climbed to 14.5 million in week two - a gain of just 2.4 million. Now line that up against its siblings: Dahmer leapt from 22 million to 33.6 million across its first two weeks. The Ed Gein Story climbed from 12.2 million to 20.7 million. The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story went from 12.3 million to 19.5 million. Every previous Monster season added at least 7 million viewers in its second week; Lizzie Borden added less than a third of that. Across its first two weeks, the new season sits at roughly 26.6 million views - solid for almost any other show on television, but trailing the entire franchise at the same point.

A different kind of Monster

The season itself is the anthology's biggest swing. All eight episodes follow Lizzie Borden, played by newcomer Ella Beatty, through the 1892 Fall River axe murders of her father Andrew and stepmother Abby - one of America's oldest unsolved true-crime mysteries, which ended with Lizzie tried and acquitted. It is the first Monster season centered on a woman, the first built around a subject who was acquitted, and the earliest historical period the series has attempted, framing Lizzie's story as part of a triptych of female rage alongside Elizabeth Bathory and Aileen Wuornos.

Critics are divided, which may explain the softer momentum. Reviews have praised the season's performances and visual style while questioning its strained historical connections and lack of nuance - a familiar split for a franchise often criticized for taking liberties with real cases. The showrunners have been open that the season is intentionally fictionalized, which has only sharpened the debate.

None of this means Monster is in trouble. The franchise has racked up nearly 170 million views across its seasons, a number few streaming properties on Earth can touch, and the Borden season's quick chart win makes a fifth chapter feel close to inevitable even without an announcement. But the pattern is new: for the first time, a Monster season is winning the week while losing the family argument. The question is no longer whether people watch - it is whether the anthology can still make them obsess.