Netflix’s ‘Monster’ Creator Reveals a Sprawling 10-Season Plan for the True Crime Anthology

True crime television has become one of streaming’s most reliable genres, but few series have managed to turn that format into an ongoing franchise quite as deliberately as Netflix’s anthology built around history’s most notorious killers. What started as a single limited series about Jeffrey Dahmer has evolved into something with far grander long-term ambitions.

With “Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story” now streaming as the anthology’s fourth installment, creator Ian Brennan has spent recent interviews reflecting on both the challenges of choosing each season’s subject and just how far he and co-creator Ryan Murphy intend to take the franchise. The answer, it turns out, is considerably bigger than a single fifth season.

Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, Ian Brennan revealed that he and Ryan Murphy are planning to make 10 total seasons of “Monster,” though the anthology’s fifth installment and its subject have not yet been confirmed. “There’s a hopper of three things, but Ryan and I both said we want to do 10 of them,” Brennan said. “It’s a fairly exhaustive list, but it’s tricky.”

Brennan described a development process built around juggling multiple possibilities simultaneously rather than committing to a fixed queue of future seasons. “We never do. We always switch. It’s always three or four different ones, and we toggle between,” he explained, painting a picture of a writers’ room constantly weighing new subjects against ones that ultimately get abandoned.

Ella Beatty explains why she felt called to portray Lizzie Borden in the latest iteration of 'Monster.' pic.twitter.com/iAEtulo0D8

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That difficulty in landing on the right subject isn’t just about finding a notorious enough name, according to Brennan. He noted that any potential subject has to support the kind of sustained intimacy a streaming drama demands, telling THR: “You’re asking people to spend seven or eight or nine or 10 hours getting inside this person’s head. They better be really interesting.”

Brennan also revealed that Season 4 wasn’t originally destined to focus on Lizzie Borden. “We were trying to crack the Luigi [Mangione] story,” he said, referring to the man accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in 2024. Ultimately, the team decided the case was too recent and still too unknown to properly develop into a full season.

Ella Beatty and Charlie Hunnam star as Lizzie and Andrew Borden in Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story.

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That pivot led the show toward Lizzie Borden instead, marking the anthology’s first season centered on a female killer. Brennan described the season as exploring a kind of triptych of serial killers, weaving in Sarah Paulson’s Aileen Wuornos and Vicky Krieps’ dual role as both Elizabeth Báthory and part of the Borden storyline, all in service of examining female rage and, as Brennan put it, “the cages we put women in and the things they will do to get out of those cages.”

Despite the ongoing controversy the series has faced over its handling of real-life tragedy, “Monster” has continued to perform strongly for Netflix, with each new season generating significant viewership and conversation. That commercial track record appears to be a major factor behind Murphy and Brennan’s confidence in committing to a full decade’s worth of installments rather than winding the format down after a handful of seasons.

With three or four potential seasons reportedly always in some stage of development at once, fans can likely expect the franchise’s rapid release pace to continue well into the future, even as Brennan continues describing the search for each new subject as genuinely difficult.

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