Ryan Murphy calls Monsters "the best thing that has happened to the Menendez brothers in 30 years"

Anyone expecting—possibly due to some sort of memory-impairing head trauma—Ryan Murphy to be contrite about the negative reaction his latest series, Monsters, has gotten from the people it’s about (i.e., Erik and Lyle Menendez) may now feel free to disabuse themselves of that notion very quickly. Murphy has now gone so far as to declare the new Netflix series “the best thing that’s happened to the Menendez brothers in 30 years,” just hours after more members of the extended Menendez clan vocalized their unhappiness with their portrayals in the show.

This is per Variety, which spoke with Murphy not long after new statements from the family members came out, condemning him for the series. (He’d previously given a slightly more restrained quote in response to Erik Menendez’s critiques.) But there is, to Murphy’s mind, no such thing as bad publicity (especially when you’re already facing life in prison without parole), and he suggests the show can only help the Menendez brothers: “They are now being talked about by millions of people all over the world,” he notes. “There’s a documentary coming out in two weeks about them, also on Netflix. And I think the interesting thing about it is it’s asking people to answer the questions, ‘Should they get a new trial? Should they be let out of jail? What happens in our society? Should people be locked away for life? Is there no chance ever at rehabilitation?’ I’m interested in that, and a lot of people are talking about it. We’re asking really difficult questions, and it’s giving these brothers another trial in the court of public opinion. From what I can tell, it’s really opened up the possibility that this evidence that they claim that they have, maybe that there is going to be a way forward for them.”

Murphy goes on to say that he genuinely thinks the brothers’ second trial was “a travesty,” although he also isn’t especially interested in being an “advocate” for them. “That’s not my job. My job as an artist was to tell a perspective in a particular story. I feel I’ve done that, but I wish them well.” (Also, he sounds genuinely irritated with Erik Menendez’s wife, Tammi Menendez, suggesting that, “Tammi [and] the family, they have always done this and they did this recently — they say, ‘lies after lies’ — but then they don’t say what the lies are. They don’t back up anything.”) Perhaps most bluntly, Murphy also states that he has no actual interest in meeting Erik or Lyle Menendez—who, again, he made an entire TV show about, and which his star, Cooper Koch, recently did. “I don’t know what I would say to them,” Murphy said. “What would I ask them? I know what their perspective is.”