Quite at random — because we seldom agree on anything to watch — Bertie and I watched Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story after we finished the second series of The Gentlemen. Both have a lot of blood flowing, or rather spattering. The screen and characters are frequently awash with red. Very wince-worthy! Ryan Murphy and Guy Ritchie both wranglers with distinctive styles — and often accused that the style overwhelms the substance. Theo James’ series garnered fairly high critical approval, but Ella Beatty’s Lizzie has gained mostly disapproval.

I disagree. And I think its themes of misogyny and women’s anger explain precisely that disparity in critical reception. Maybe it’s just because I — like so many women I know — am so filled with rage every day in this country, that I enjoyed very much its over-the-top take on the story of Fall River’s most notorious resident. I never had any interest in the other series of Monster. We are ruled by male monsters who are destroying everything they can get their hands on in a white supremacist frenzy of entitlement. I don’t need or want to see any fictional version of them. I am sick to the back teeth of their horrors every day and will do as much as I can to see they not only lose the reins of power but pay for their myriad crimes.

But the program: from the first episode we were laughing and wincing in equal measures. Beatty’s Lizzie (yes, the series is a bit nepo-baby central but the children of talented people can sometimes get the good genes [when there are good genes to be got, not just orange malevolence]) is an amalgam of innocence obliviousness and simmering rage. The spark to the kindling is Vicky Krieps’ Bridget/Maggie who also doubles as Elisabeth Báthory, the early modern Hungarian serial killer in the bedtime reading the two chums share.

Spoileriffic from hereon at random, so proceed with caution.

Actually let me digress for a second to say Bertie and I both want to know where you can buy those ever-blossoming and ever-fruiting cherry trees that were beautiful pink and laden with cherries at any time of year. Hee. They were beautiful and the flower crowns and the dance in the dovecot. There were some very gorgeous scenes along with all the dripping blood.

It’s fascinating that after Bridget sparked the murderous desire, she was the one to pull back in fear of their monstrous actions even at the first trial murder. She had the intellectual understanding of all the misogyny and inequality and unfairness that they both faced, as young women in a patriarchal family, but also the additional press of being a servant and a foreigner. But she did not have the inchoate rage. Anger is not the same thing. Rage is beyond words, a coiled fire that lays waste all it touches when it leaps up. Rage burns through its container eventually, consuming it unless it can be sent outside it. Make art or make murder — surely there are other choices, too?

Rebecca Hall as step-mama Abby is just marvellously evil in that barely contained passive-aggressive manner that becomes just aggressive when dealing with her many inferiors. On the tip of my mental tongue is another similar mother figure from fiction that I just can’t quite conjure at this moment but she is superb.

OMG the vomit scene! I usually gag at them but I was laughing so hard it did not bother me.

Jessica Barden as Nance O’Neill was just perfect. So much fun and so perfectly embodying the jobbing actor who has to protect and promote herself. A delight.

Billie Lourd as Emma is also terrific. Her own rage gets channeled more effectively than Lizzie’s — finding and refusing beaux, and when she has more than she can channel, the furious use of the axe in a non-murderous way (well, to people anyway) was cathartic. Her emotional appearance on the witness stand was absolutely wonderful.

Now more difficult: absolutely without a doubt Sarah Paulson was magic in the role of serial killer Aileen Wuornos. I liked the stylistic way that women who killed became sort of fairy tale inspiration for later women killers. Except they’re not fairy tales. I find it difficult to know how I feel. While Báthory is so far in the past that it doesn’t feel exploitative, and Lizzie Borden’s house is indeed now a hotel or B&B where you can stay, Wuornos is recent. In my lifetime. And people who suffered losses from her murders are still around. Some of the men she killed were no princes by any measure, but did they deserve to die at her hand? No. So I’m uncomfortable around that aspect of the series while acknowledging that they did not glamourise her (in fact, made her very difficult indeed).

I’m so glad they didn’t try to fit Lizzie into the ‘origin story’ of the other killers, which inevitably was rape. It fills me with rage that that’s always the only trauma men seem to acknowledge. There are so many others (even though men continue to abuse women in this way, mostly with impunity) that offer rich possibilities for exploration LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE.

Whiplash change of subject: Kaya Scodelario was fantastic in The Gentlemen. A series swimming in testosterone with one bright light of difference. Insufficient Giancarlo Esposito! They gradually crept away from the pale, male, and stale, but not very far. Monster mostly got away from the male but not the pale. It was also a nice touch that they focused on Lizzie’s support of the suffragette movement (a fictional embellishment, but it felt good). If you want to separate fact from fiction, here’s a piece to read.

Anyhoo, I didn’t feel like my time was wasted and I look forward to seeing Ella Beatty in Sarah Polley’s The Bell Jar.