Monstrousness is a constant in “Grotesquerie” and “Monsters”

About halfway through the new season of “Monsters,” Ryan Murphy's anthology series about people who do very bad things, Kitty Menendez (Chloë Sevigny) explains why she hates children — not just her children, parricide Lyle and Erik Menendez, but all children.

“You're draining your bones of calcium as they grow inside you,” she tells her therapist. “They destroy your body as they eat you alive.”

Is it a particularly cruel description of what it feels like to carry a child? Of course it is. For Murphy, whose traces often seem to be found in every other television work, entertainment is a series of baroque monstrosities, human and otherwise.

“Monsters” debuted on Netflix just about a week before the first two episodes of the new series “Grotesquerie” arrived on FX and Hulu. That's a big helping of Murphy, who co-created both projects with flourishes familiar to fans of his oeuvre, including “American Horror Story” and “Feud,” the most recent installment of which focused on Truman Capote's relationship with ladies of New York's high society – and “Ratched,” a macabre and admirably lively prequel to “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Large doses of camp and melodrama tell grisly stories about creepy behavior. Beneath the bubbling surface there is generally a plea for social tolerance. And blood. Lots of blood.

When we meet Lyle and Erik Menendez (Nicholas Alexander Chavez and Cooper Koch), they are sitting in a limo listening to Milli Vanilli as Lyle raves about the new line of chicken wings he wants to launch. They're on their way to their parents' funeral, and unless you've lived in a cave for the last 30 years, you know that they shot these parents with shotguns into the next world, into their own home. The series shows us the horrific act multiple times and in several possible iterations as it seems to weigh different questions. Were the brothers traumatized abuse victims who had finally had enough, or spoiled sociopaths (or both)? Is there a chance that Kitty and Jose (Javier Bardem) and not Lyle and Erik were the real monsters? And could we possibly see this graphic carnage again?

Murphy has stated that he aimed for a kind of Rashomon effect by telling the Menendez story from different angles and refusing to insist on a definitive version of the truth. The approach leads to some strange results, including an over-reliance on Dominick Dunne (Nathan Lane), who covered the case for Vanity Fair and apparently hosted lots of gossipy dinner parties (in these moments we seem to be back in the land of…) . Capote and “Feud”). Dunne's daughter Dominique was murdered several years ago, and in “Monsters” he harbors deep animosity toward heartbroken defense attorneys like Leslie Abramson (Ari Graynor), who represents and fawns over Erik. However, even she can't hide the fact that the Beverly Hills brothers went on a luxury shopping spree after their parents died. “Monsters” is, among other things, a nasty parody of affluenza.

“Monsters” assumes that Jose repeatedly raped his two sons, and when he explains that he wants to mold his children into young Romans hardened in a spirit of male pain and love, it’s hard not to little to tremble. Bardem, as always, understands the brief, and his sadistic, instinctively autocratic Jose earns a place in the actor's gallery of evil alongside No Country for Old Men's Anton Chigurh and Skyfall's Raoul Silva. If there is justice, one day he will decide to take on Richard III. to record.

Niecy Nash-Betts plays Det. Lois Tryon on FX's “Grotesquerie.”

(Prashant Gupta / FX)

One measure of Murphy's appeal is the number of great actors lining up to occupy his world, including Sarah Paulson, Jessica Lange, Tom Hollander, Naomi Watts, Angela Bassett and John Carroll Lynch. This list also includes Niecy Nash-Betts, a supporting actress in Season 1 of Monster (singular, with emphasis on Jeffrey Dahmer), who plays bone-tired cop Det. Lois Tryon in Grotesquerie. The title could be applied to most of Murphy's work, but in the opening minutes of the new series it ups the grand guignol ante as Tryon enters a crime scene where a family has apparently been forced to eat part of their father (and you). thought shotguns were bad). It continues from there, with ritually staged murders, blood drains, and even an elaborate (and actually quite impressive) Last Supper tableau of murdered homeless people.

While the monsters in Monsters are all recognizably human, Grotesquerie suggests that something more cosmic is at work, like a darkness evoked in a story by horror master HP Lovecraft, or at least Se7en. Like that David Fincher film, “Grotesquerie” wraps its evils in a sordid, nocturnal film and crowns them with a crown of thorns. The heavy-drinking Tryon, whose daughter (Raven Goodwin) seems determined to eat herself into an early grave and whose husband (Courtney B. Vance), an unfaithful philosophy professor, is in a coma, enlists the help of a bird-like nun/ journalist. Sister Megan (Micaela Diamond), who helps unravel the not-so-subtle biblical implications of this series of murders. “To understand this monster,” she tells Tryon, “you have to reach ecstasy.”

We're a long way from the “monsters'” exploitation of wealth, but it's hardly exaggerated: After discussing the theological dimensions of the carnage with Sister Megan, young Father Charlie (Chavez, doing double Murphy duty here) masturbates violently and then castigates his back a bloody pulp. Let him who is without sin brandish the first cat of nine tails.

The same masochistic priest reveals to Sister Megan that his all-time favorite serial killer is Ed Gein, the real-life, gate-robbing Wisconsin psycho who inspired “Psycho” (Robert Bloch's novel and Alfred Hitchcock's film) and “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” – and the next installment of “Monster” starring Charlie Hunnam has already been announced. “Murphy World” can feel like an echo chamber similar in scope, if not tone, to Taylor Sheridan’s stories of the West headlined “Yellowstone.”

The constant is the monstrosity or grotesqueness, presented with a nod and a wink that do nothing to diminish the viewer's subsequent urge to take a shower. There are other types of horror on television, including the Lovecraftian works of Mike Flanagan (“Midnight Mass,” “The Fall of the House of Usher”), which balance sensation with a more literary bent. But Murphy seems better suited to these times. At the beginning of “Grotesquerie,” Tryon speculates about the kind of stories her new journalist friend's readership seeks: “The crueler, the better.” And Murphy might add: Fame, hallelujah.