Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s latest installment of the Netflix true crime anthology, this time tackling the infamous 1892 axe murders in Fall River, Massachusetts. Unlike every other season, which centered on subjects whose guilt was never in question, Lizzie Borden was tried and acquitted. According to the show’s own creators, that ambiguity was meant to be the point, they’ve been open in interviews that this season is about female rage and repression, using Lizzie’s story as a lens for a much broader look at what women have historically endured.

The reviews have been mostly mixed to negative, and I agree with every single negative review and then some. So here are the 5 worst things about the show, to me.

1. The made up drama, instead of trusting the real story.

Lizzie Borden’s actual case is fascinating on its own, a woman tried and acquitted, a mystery that’s stayed unsolved for over a century. Instead of digging into that ambiguity, the show pads itself out with fabricated subplots and cuts out real, relevant details, like her sister, entirely. I acknowledge it’s a dramatization, but the real story had more than enough to work with without all the embellishments.

2. The Aileen Wuornos storyline should have been a separate season.

Personally, I think Aileen Wuornos has been covered enough that revisiting her only makes sense if you’re bringing something new to the story. The film Monster, which Charlize Theron won an Oscar for, already set a high bar. This show doesn’t clear it. Aileen’s storyline shows up in the second half as a parallel to Lizzie’s, and the connection between the two adds nothing. It doesn’t deepen the story, it just stretches the runtime and dilutes whatever momentum the Lizzie material had going for it. It seems like they had nothing else to add toward the end, so they pulled this out. I will say the Countess Elizabeth Báthory storyline told in the first half was the only interesting part of the show.

3. The unnecessary, badly executed gore.

The cartoonish vomiting, the blood, the gore, all badly executed. Watching the vomiting scene, I could tell it was exaggerated on purpose, maybe for comedic effect, maybe because they thought it would land as more dramatic. Who knows, but what I do know is that it was all bad and simply dumb, coming across less like meaningful commentary and more like the show reaching for edge and shock value it hadn’t earned.

4. The random overacting.

There’s a scene where Lizzie confronts her father about her stepmother killing her pigeons, upset that he won’t take her side. In that scene, Charlie Hunnam, who is usually a talented actor, gives one of the worst performances of his career. I couldn’t tell if the overacting came from bad direction or him simply not connecting with the character. Maybe a bit of both.

5. The feminism message it seems to want to give falls flat.

First of all, history still isn’t sure she committed the crime, and that debate exists independent of her acquittal. But the show’s attempt at a feminism message ends up feeling hollow. Time’s review put it well, pointing out that the show cycles through nearly every hardship associated with womanhood, rape, domestic violence, childbirth, housework, pressure to marry, as if viewers need each one spelled out in gory detail just to understand that being a woman under patriarchy is hard. That’s not insight, it’s just repetition dressed up as commentary. And the show doesn’t even land on a coherent point about it. Lizzie gets away with murder by learning to perform femininity in court, while the wealthy, privileged Báthory ends up bricked up in a wall for her crimes. If the show is trying to say something about privilege and complicity with patriarchal expectations, those two outcomes actually contradict each other, and the show never bothers to reconcile that.

Long story short, the show is bad. The most frustrating part is that if this project had been produced by someone with a real point of view instead of Ryan Murphy, maybe it would have actually landed on something. Instead, it’s just more of the same, over-dramatized, over-stuffed, and somehow still boring.

I’d rate this 4.2/10.