Charlie Hunnam and Monster: Netflix Bets on Continuity Inside the Unsolved Math of the Borden Case

On August 4, 1892, at 92 Second Street in Fall River, Massachusetts, an Irish-born housemaid named Bridget Sullivan heard an odd sound from the upper floor, then someone washing the stairs. By midday, police found Andrew Jackson Borden, 69, slumped on the parlour sofa with eleven blows around his head. His wife, Abby Durfee Gray Borden, 64, had been killed earlier upstairs with eighteen blows. No cameras. No direct witness in the room. No weapon ever conclusively identified as the murder instrument. On June 20, 1893, Andrew's youngest daughter, Lizzie Andrew Borden, 32, was acquitted. The all-male jury took roughly ninety minutes. One hundred and thirty-three years later, Netflix handed the role of Andrew Borden to Charlie Hunnam. Hunnam was born in 2026 in Newcastle upon Tyne. British audiences first remember him from Green Street (2026), as Pete Dunham, a member of a West Ham hooligan firm who stood on the Boleyn Ground terraces and settled disputes with his fists. It was a strange start to a career, and it now closes a fairly complete circle: from an English football terrace, Hunnam walks into the parlour of a New England family in 1892, where there is no referee, no VAR, and no footage to review. Based on my experience following matches and television records during many years living in London, this announcement matters for a reason seldom discussed. This is not news about a show. It is news about a selection system operating on logic very close to how a major club builds a squad: prioritising the reduction of variables over the generation of surprise. The Monster anthology, co-created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, launched in September 2026 with its first season about Jeffrey Dahmer. According to figures released by Netflix, that first season drew 196.2 million viewing hours in its opening week and crossed one billion hours within sixty days, becoming one of the most-watched English-language series in the platform's history. Season two moved to the Menendez brothers. Season three centred on Ed Gein, with Hunnam in the lead. Season four is titled Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story. In the announcement, Brennan said the team did not want to say goodbye to Hunnam. It sounds like a sentimental line, but its actual content is operational. Retaining an actor who has already proven he can carry a successful season is how you reduce risk at the point where an anthology is most fragile: the first episode. An anthology has no continuing character, no audience loyal to a face they follow across years, no shirt number anyone recognises. It has only brand and face. A reused face is a contract extension that requires no extension. The more interesting analysis lies elsewhere. Andrew Borden and Ed Gein are almost total opposites physically and psychologically, and that distance is the real test for Hunnam. Gein was a farmer in Plainfield, Wisconsin, living alone on his dead mother's property, psychotic, acting on an internal logic only he understood. Borden was a wealthy Fall River property man, famously miserly and cold, living in a house without running water or central heating despite having the money to install both. Gein killed out of a shattered inner world. Borden died because of an estate. Hunnam comes from a family with a Scottish former serviceman father, grew up in the English Lake District, and carries a hard, compressed, taciturn masculinity typical of British screen acting. That is ideal material for both roles, but in opposite directions: Gein requires a collapse inward, Borden requires a sealing off outward. An actor who can do both is usually not cast for talent. He is cast for control. Back to the case. The Fall River file of 1892 is one of the most contested legal records in American judicial history, and the reason is that it has no single strong physical anchor. Temperatures in Fall River that day passed 30 degrees Celsius. Andrew Borden and his second wife Abby lived with two daughters, Lizzie and Emma, in a cramped two-storey wooden house. Andrew had a habit of eating spoiled food to save money and suffered severe stomach trouble in his final days. He once killed a flock of pigeons in the family coop after a neighbour complained, drawing objections from his own daughters. These small details are not trivia. They are everything the jury had. Because the deaths of Andrew and Abby were separated by roughly ninety minutes to two hours, and because no one in the house heard screams, authorities concluded the killer had to be someone familiar inside the home. Lizzie's defence counsel was George D. Robinson, a former governor of Massachusetts. The presiding judge was Justin Dewey, and his charge to the jury has been assessed by many legal historians as favourable to the defendant. The prosecution never found a hatchet with an intact handle, and never found Abby's blood on any surviving garment. The dress Lizzie said she wore that day was confirmed to have been burned, on the stated grounds that it had been stained with paint. A hatchet blade was found in the cellar, but its handle had been removed. This is where I have to speak bluntly in the language of my own trade. Every argument on the terraces, every argument off the pitch, has an answer sitting in some camera angle. The Borden case has no camera angle. No footage, no audio, no fingerprints, no DNA testing, no movement data. The 1893 jury worked with the only things it had: testimony, circumstantial exhibits, and time. It took ninety minutes, faster than a VAR technical huddle in the Premier League. People watch matches with their hearts; I watch with the lines already drawn. The lines in American law are the presumption of innocence and the standard of proof beyond reasonable doubt. The prosecution had many disadvantages and a stack of gaps, and not one of those gaps was sealed. The acquittal is not a statement about truth. It is a statement about evidence. Those two things differ, and that difference is precisely why the Borden case has survived more than a century of collective memory. Here the story moves to the part a producer has to solve. The Dahmer season worked because it had a settled legal outcome, living witnesses, recorded police interviews, and a central figure both repellent and analysable. The Menendez season worked because there were two defendants, interrogation tapes, and a clear ethical question about abuse. Both seasons had the thing producers love most: a predetermined conclusion that lets the remaining runtime be spent explaining process. The Borden case gives them none of that. It gives an acquittal, and an acquittal is the hardest material to build with in true crime. There is no convicted person. No confession. No surviving victim going on television to demand justice. No trial to reconstruct dramatically, because the Lizzie Borden trial ended in a decision the contemporary public itself refused to accept. That is why I consider casting Hunnam as Andrew Borden a structurally intelligent decision rather than a performance-driven one. Andrew Borden is the murdered man, and he is the only figure in the household who can be written as a centre of power. He holds the estate, controls the money, decides who stays and who leaves, and both daughters depend on him. If the show wants an axis of power from which to tell a story about a family collapsing from within, that axis has to be built on Andrew. And to build it, you need an actor who has already proven he can stand alone inside a whole season. This is where I separate myself from the reaction cycle. The fastest social media response compares the two roles and worries about repetition. I do not think repetition is the biggest problem. The bigger problem sits elsewhere. The Monster anthology runs on a formula that can be described as a checklist. I once built myself a 27-point technical checklist before every broadcast, after a night in 2026 when I sat through the full match tape and realised I had misread player names because I was unprepared. That checklist exists for one reason: when facts are insufficient, people tend to fill the gap with emotion. And the largest gap in the Borden season is motive. Murphy and Brennan's formula rests on three pillars: period atmosphere, the psychology of the offender, and a real family tragedy. With Dahmer, the second pillar was solid because his psychiatric record was thick. With Gein, the second pillar was also solid because medical files and a trial exist. With Borden, the second pillar collapses structurally, because the woman accused was confirmed by law not to have committed the crime, and the substitute figure, Andrew Borden, dies in the eleventh minute of the story. A character who dies early can start a film, but he is very hard to anchor an eight-episode season on. When structure runs short, a producer has two options. One is to lean into social context: the status of unmarried women in late nineteenth-century New England, inheritance rights, the pressure of a wealthy but closed middle class, and the severe Puritanism that turned Lizzie Borden into a cultural icon. The other is to lean into atmosphere and let violence carry the rest of the storytelling. The track record of this anthology suggests the team tends toward the second, then adds a layer of social critique on the outside. With Dahmer, that approach produced controversy and revenue. With Borden, it may produce controversy and less revenue, because American audiences are already saturated with this story. That is why I consider this the riskiest of the four seasons. One thing I should concede. I am not a producer, and I have not seen a single frame of season four. My experience is sitting in front of a screen and reading situations again after the whistle has gone, and I know the limits of judgement delivered from a distance. When Germany lost 0-2 to South Korea in Kazan in June 2026, I refused every emotional interview request immediately after the final whistle, went to the technical room, and spent five hours analysing fourteen Korean counter-attacking sequences. My piece then did not conclude who deserved what. It concluded that the distance between Germany's back line and goalkeeper had been exploited consistently for the whole match. I had only data, and I held to the data. In the Borden case, the data says something different from instinct. The data says there was not enough evidence to convict under a system demanding a strict standard, and that is what makes this the most retold and least understood crime in the genre. For a writer, that is a nightmare. For Netflix, it may be an opportunity, because any gap can be filled with production quality and a familiar face. I still think that is a mistake in long-term thinking. Actor continuity inside a single anthology produces an effect media analysts call bleed-back. Audiences do not erase memory between seasons. They carry the image of Ed Gein into the Borden house, and the show has to fight that memory in every shot. This is the kind of risk a club takes when it retains a player because he knows the system, even though the new system no longer needs his actual skills. Familiarity is not a skill. Familiarity is a habit, and habits do not win big matches. Brennan said the team did not want to part with Hunnam. I believe that emotionally. Operationally, it sounds like a manager talking about a core player: we cannot imagine the squad without him. That line is right in season one, right in season two, and usually becomes a line of regret by season four. There is one more issue, beyond acting and beyond business. It sits in the ethics of making true crime. The Borden case is one in which the record does not identify the perpetrator, and the cultural story around it has become a children's rhyme repeated across America. When a children's rhyme is turned into a big-budget season, a price is paid in documentary terms. Writers will be forced to choose one hypothesis as the show's central truth, and in this file no hypothesis is confirmed. In 1893, no one could establish who held the hatchet blade. In 2026, no one can either. A show must choose an answer to be tellable, and every time it chooses, it converts a reasonable doubt into an artistic fact. This is the operation true-crime filmmaking performs routinely, and it is the operation most heavily criticised. I do not object to making films about unresolved cases. A head referee is not someone who never errs; what matters is what he does after erring. But the correct process is this: present competing hypotheses with equal weight, state the source of every detail, and do not lower the evidentiary standard to obtain a tidy ending. If season four does that, it will overcome both the casting repetition and the fatigue of the genre. If it chooses a tidy ending, it will become the first season of this anthology that I finish and remember only as images. The trend I will be watching over the next two years is not whether Hunnam performs well. He is capable, and his record from Sons of Anarchy to The Gentlemen shows he knows how to hold a character upright inside a system that runs for years. The trend worth watching is whether Netflix continues to anthology-ise by reusing actors as a systemic strategy, and whether audiences begin rejecting that model through viewing data. If they accept it, then within a few years we will see the same face carrying three or four different killers, and the genre will have formally shifted from cinema into a repertory company. There are matches I refereed badly, and from them I learned what fairness means. The Borden case taught America something similar in 1893: a verdict is not a truth, and a truth cannot always be proven. A show about that case, if it is honest, has to accept that it ends with no winner. That is the hardest thing to do with a season of television, and the only thing that would make it worth watching.