Netflix has done it again. "The Fall of the House of Usher" creator Mike Flanagan's latest project revisits Lizzie Borden, the Massachusetts spinster acquitted of butchering her father and stepmother in 1892, and the streaming giant is packaging one of the most gruesome unsolved crimes in American history as prestige television.
We live in an era where true crime is binge fuel, where a double homicide becomes a weekend conversation starter, and where the algorithm knows exactly which of your neighbors will press play first.
A woman was accused of striking her father roughly ten times with a hatchet while he napped on a couch.
Her stepmother took around eighteen blows.
That's not a mystery to be solved over takeout — that's a documented human atrocity, and it's now competing for your attention alongside reality dating shows.
The Borden case has never really left us.
The rhyme children still chant on playgrounds, the bed-and-breakfast that sells "murder mystery weekends" in the actual house, the city of Fall River that has built an entire tourism economy on the killings.
It just gave it a bigger screen and a better soundtrack.
Watching a dramatized murder in your living room, phone in hand, pausing to refill your drink, blurs something that used to stay blurry.
We root for defense attorneys the way we root for sports teams, and we call it being informed.
The deeper discomfort isn't that Netflix made the show.
It's that we'll watch it, discuss it at brunch, and move on by Monday.
Meanwhile the real Elizabeth Borden — acquitted, ostracized, dead at 66 — never got to explain herself to a camera crew, and her father and stepmother never got a say at all.
There's a version of this that's legitimate.
Historical drama can illuminate how women were trapped by inheritance laws, how the press manufactured monsters, how a small industrial city turned a tragedy into a brand.
Flanagan has done thoughtful work before, and the cast alone will draw eyes.
A verdict that satisfied no one sells best of all, because it lets every viewer become the judge.
That's a courtroom where the audience never has to deliberate.
Our culture keeps insisting it wants the truth about violence while consuming it as entertainment.
Eventually one of them has to give, and lately it hasn't been the entertainment.
Final Thoughts
But the fact that we're asking that question about a hatchet murder — again, a century and a half later, on a platform built to keep us scrolling — says more about us than about Lizzie.