You know it’s there. It’s been lurking in your Netflix queue for weeks now, taunting you, beckoning you with its sure promise of sexy, lurid thrills, but you’ve been holding back – and we can’t say we blame you. After all, that “Dahmer” show was pretty hard to watch.

For many Netflix viewers, there have been no such qualms; though Ryan Murphy’s “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” debuted nearly a month ago, it’s currently the platform’s #3 most-watched series in the U.S., despite mixed reviews from critics and controversy over the way the show’s narrative depicts the facts of the notorious 1989 murder that put the two brothers in the national spotlight through two highly publicized trials. Even if killing their wealthy parents put the Menandez brothers into prison for life, it also put them into the upper echelon of “True Crime” superstars, and that makes anything dealing with their story “must-see TV” for a lot of people.

If you’re one of those who have resisted it so far, it’s likely your reasons have something to do with the very things that make it so irresistible to so many others. It’s hard to imagine a more sensational (or more gruesome) crime story than the tale of Lyle and Erik (Nicholas Alexander Chavez and Cooper Koch), who killed their wealthy parents with multiple shotgun blasts in their Beverly Hills mansion, claimed the deaths were the result of an organized crime “hit,” and then went on an extravagant spending spree with their multi-million-dollar inheritance. Even knowing just those surface details, it’s brimming with circumstances that conjure deep and troubling questions, not least about how two abundantly fortunate young men – Lyle was 21 at the time of the killing, Erik only 18 – could possibly have become capable of such a horrific act; their claim they acted in fear, after years of sexual and psychological abuse from their parents, offers answers that only leads to more questions. It’s easy to see how a morbid fascination could develop around the case (and the perpetrators, who at the time were each charismatic, handsome, and somehow boyishly adorable in spite of the silver-spoon detachment they seemed to exude) in a society endlessly fascinated by the dirty secrets and bad behavior of rich, beautiful people.

That, of course, makes the Menendez saga a natural fit with Ryan Murphy’s brand of television, which embraces the sensationalism of whatever subject it tackles – as we’ve seen from the transgressively macabre twists of “American Horror Story” to the scandal-icious celebrity backbiting of “Feud” to the campy noir-flavored psychopathy of “Ratched.” His “American Crime Story” anthology has delivered its true-life dramas with an equal eye toward creating those “WTF?” moments that inevitably have social media buzzing with both glee and outrage the morning after they drop, and the “Monster” franchise is a natural progression, which employs Murphy’s shrewd knack for cultural provocation to unearth the underlying social dysfunctions that help create an environment in which such killers can be created.

With the inaugural installment, “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story,” it can be argued that he crafted a chilling masterpiece of binge-able long-form storytelling that not only took viewers into the unspeakable horrors that took place in the killer’s apartment, but into the mind of the man who committed them. Yet while the show proved successful, earning an impressive tally of critical accolades, it was met with a harsher tone – much of it from families of Dahmer’s real-life victims – for capitalizing on his crimes.

For “Menendez,” the reception has been predictably similar. Its critical reception has not been quite as warm, with many reviewers taking issue with Murphy’s signature slicked-up style and the show’s overt homoeroticism, but the controversies have come just as expected. Objections over the extremely unflattering portrayal of José and Kitty Mendez (the ill-fated parents, played here with star-power intensity by Javier Bardem and Chloë Sevigny), and of the incestuous bond alleged between the title characters themselves, have arisen alongside complaints about the perceived distortion of facts — which here support a narrative, favoring the boys’ version of events, that Murphy (who co-wrote the series as well as producing it) wants to advance.

It’s certainly fair to claim that Murphy plays fast and loose with facts; his purpose here is not to transcribe events, like a docuseries, but to interpret them. He and his fellow writers craft “Monsters” theatrically, with bold strokes and operatic crescendos: they mine it for black humor and milk it for emotional intensity, matching a visual aesthetic that plays up the brothers’ pretty-boy charms, caressing their sculpted bodies with the camera and frequently showing them in various states of near or total nudity. Less obvious, but perhaps more to the true point of the project, the series fixates on the messy, petty, and ignoble traits of its characters, and illuminate the self-serving personal motives driving their public agendas; it even employs a “Rashomon”-esque approach in which it variously portrays different versions of the same events depending on the character describing them. In short, it’s not a show that is looking for factual truth; it’s searching for a more complex truth behind the facts.

That truth, perhaps, has a lot to do with the shame, stigma, and silence around abuse; the tendency to disbelieve the victims (especially when they are male – a prosecutor during the trials famously argued that men “couldn’t be raped”); and the cultural homophobia that further complicates the dynamic when the abuse comes from someone of the same sex. Does such abuse warrant absolution for murder, especially when the murder is as excessively brutal as the killing of José and Kitty Menendez? That’s a question Murphy and crew leave up to the viewers.

Such moral ambiguity is surely part of the reason that shows like “Monsters” and its predecessor are met with such hostility from some viewers; they offer no easy comfort, no straightforward moral order to reassure us that our perceptions of good and evil are just or fair or even correct – and if you’re looking for a hero to step forward and make sense of it all for us, you’re not going to find one.

If that’s too bleak a prospect for you, or if the notion of criminals as celebrities is something you’re just not comfortable enough with to make allowances for artistic intention, then “Monsters” may not be for you. 

For anyone else who has hesitated to watch, however, it’s a show worthy of your time. Though it might seem uneven, even disjointed at times, it paints an overall picture of the Menendez case that is about something much more than the murders – or the murderers – themselves. The performances are all accomplished, well-tuned together to a sort of elevated authenticity, with particular praise for a jaw-dropping star turn by Koch, who monologues his way through a full-length one-shot episode that was filmed in a single take.

The latter alone is enough to make “Monsters” an awards-worthy piece of television. While it may not be the right show for every taste, it’s not “trash TV” either. It’s a bold and challenging work from one of our most prolific and dedicated queer showmen, and if it leaves you feeling sorry for monsters, is that really such a bad thing?

Anyone who was alive and old enough to listen to the radio in the 1970s knows that disco wasn’t just a genre of music. It was an entire lifestyle, centered around dancing in nightclubs to music that meshed R&B with new electronic sounds and an infectiously up-tempo beat – and at the height of its popularity, it had bled into the entire American culture. Every TV theme or movie soundtrack was flavored with a disco vibe, every musician seeking a comeback recorded a disco record, and every would-be dance dandy dreamed of sporting a pair of “angel flight” slacks to the disco every Saturday night.

If you didn’t live through it yourself, most of what you might know about this era is likely gleaned from its popular culture – the hot radio singles, the popular movies like “Saturday Night Fever,” the kitschy crossovers like “Hooked On Classics” and parodies like “Disco Duck” – after the skyrocketing popularity of the phenomenon had made it a golden ticket for anyone who wanted to capitalize on it. They were crossovers into the homogenizing mainstream, intended to commercialize the disco frenzy for consumers beyond the record stores and nightclubs, which became cultural touchstones, for better or for worse; but because their campy shadows still loom so large, anyone whose understanding of the “disco craze” has been gleaned only from TV or the movies is likely to remember it as a little more than a fun-but-silly footnote in late 20th-century American history.

Fortunately, PBS and BBC Studios have unveiled a new docuseries that sets the record straight – or perhaps we should say it “queers” the record, because it offers a detailed and savvy chronicle that illuminates the ties that bind the story of disco inextricably with an essential chapter of modern queer history, revealing its link to the liberation movement that blossomed in the ‘70s and continues to weave its thread through American society today.

Produced and directed by Louise Lockwood and Shianne Brown, “Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution” – which broadcast its first episode on June 18, and is available for streaming in its entirety for subscribers via the PBS website – charts disco’s origins, success, and demise across a trio of episodes for a comprehensive look at the whirlwind of forces that surrounded and catapulted it into American consciousness. It explores the phenomenon as a vibrant and thrillingly inclusive cultural wave that originated within a blended underground of marginalized communities in New York City, at private loft parties and underground dance clubs, and grew until it had saturated the world. It highlights the sense of empowerment, made tangible in the opportunity and elevation it offered to artists who were queer, female or people of color, and yet it still welcomed anybody who wanted to join the dance with open arms. It was a chance to celebrate, to feel good and have fun after an intense period of social strife in America, which meant it went hand-in-hand with the sexual liberation that was also exploding across society. Most importantly of all, perhaps, it came with a laid-back vibe that gave you permission to let loose in ways that would have shocked your parents; in retrospect, it’s hard to imagine how anybody could resist.

Yet of course, there were people who did; and when the juggernaut that was disco inevitably began to lose steam as a result of its ubiquity and the perceived decadence of its hedonistic lifestyle, it was their voices that emerged to tell us all that “Disco Sucks” – a catch phrase that is perhaps almost as much a cultural touchstone as some of the genre’s biggest hit records.

That’s the broad overview that most people who remember the disco era already know, but “Soundtrack of a Revolution” gets much more granular than that. Much of the enlightening detail is provided, as one might expect, through a rich collection of contemporary footage highlighting the sights and sounds – the people, the parties, the music, the clubs, the fashion – of the time. Counterpoint to that material, however, comes through modern day interviews with key figures who were present for it all, whose memories help connect the dots between the evolution of disco and the societal environment in which it took place.

Of course, most audiences who are drawn to a documentary about disco will likely be coming – at least partly – for the music, and fortunately, this one gives us plenty of that, too. Better still, it gives us deep dives into some of the most iconic tracks of the seventies, not just spotlighting the artists who recorded them, but the DJs and tastemakers whose ideas and innovations built the very sound that fueled it all. Some of these pioneers may be gone, but they are represented via archival footage, and many who are still among us offer up their insider perspectives through candid filmed interviews that are woven throughout the series. There’s a first-person reliability that comes from allowing these participants in the history to tell their own part of it for themselves, and it gives the series an atmosphere of authenticity – not to mention an influx of free-wheeling, colorful personality – that can’t be achieved through the observations and analysis of expert “talking head” commentators. 

It’s these voices that also help to impress upon us the feeling of freedom and acceptance that developed in those early disco clubs, where people from minority cultures could come together and feel safe as they danced to music that came from others like them, and the frustration of watching as it was co-opted by a (mostly white and heterosexual) mainstream and watered down into a pale mockery of itself – something that “killed” disco long before hate-fueled backlash from a racist, misogynistic, homophobic culminated in the infamous anti-disco rally at Chicago’s Comiskey Park, as documented in the series’ final episode.

Yet although it stops short of blaming homophobia and bigotry for the genre’s collapse, “Soundtrack of a Revolution” leaves no doubt of its influence over the environment that surrounded it, nor of the impact of the subsequent AIDS crisis on stopping the advance of queer liberation that was at the heart of the disco movement in its tracks – and in an election year that might make the difference between preserving or dismantling the ideal of Equality in America, the story of disco’s audacious rise and ignoble fall feels like a particularly apt warning message from the past.

Even so, one of the many gifts of the series is that it reveals a continuing creative lineage that, far from being cut off with the “death” of disco, has gone on to evolve and expand into new genres of dance and musical expression. Disco, it seems, never really died; it just went back into the underground where it was born and continued to develop, reinventing itself to meet the taste and match the needs of new generations along the way.

We could all take a lesson from that.

Let’s admit it: by the time Hollywood’s awards season draws to a close, most of us are more than ready for a good mindless “B movie” to cleanse our palettes. After the glut of “serious” and “important” films dominating the public conversation, it’s just incredibly freeing to watch something that feels — at some level, at least — more like entertainment than it does like doing homework.

That’s one of the biggest reasons why the timing of “Drive-Away Dolls,” which hit screens on Feb. 23, feels like a really savvy move, especially since it comes from a major Hollywood studio and boasts a multi-Oscar-winning director – Ethan Coen, who alongside brother Joel is half of one of Hollywood’s most prodigious filmmaking teams – at its helm. A retro-inspired and neon-lit road trip/chick flick/neo-noir thriller featuring lesbian leading characters and leaning hard into the visual palette of the ‘70s-era exploitation drive-in movie fodder it aims to both emulate and reinvent, it lays no claim to lofty purpose or intellectual conceit; instead, it takes its audience on an unabashedly raunchy 1999-set wild ride in which a pair of mismatched adventurers find themselves unwittingly entangled in a caper involving a mysterious briefcase and the eccentric trio of thugs tasked with tracking it down. It tells the kind of story we expect to be able to check our brains at the door for, and just sit back to enjoy the mindless thrills.

In this case, that story centers on two young queer Philadelphia women – free-spirited sexual adventurer Jamie (Margaret Qualley), whose infidelity has tanked her relationship with girlfriend Suki (Beanie Feldstein), and square peg Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan), whose discomfort with the hedonistic social scene of big city lesbian life has her longing for the simpler pleasures of her childhood home in Tallahassee – who embark on a road trip together to Florida in search of new beginnings. It’s clear from the start that they’re at cross purposes; Jamie sees the trip as an opportunity to “loosen up” her uptight friend, while Marian just wants to get back to where she once belonged. Unbeknownst to either, however, a shady cadre of operatives (Colman Domingo, Joey Slotnick, C.J. Wilson) is on their trail, thanks to something hidden in the trunk of their rental car, and their journey is about to take a detour into unexpectedly dangerous territory.

As a premise, it’s not hard to see close parallels to many of the themes one often finds running throughout the Coen Brothers’ films; the quirky trappings of its crime story plot, the granular focus on the behavioral oddities of its characters, the whimsical (if often pointed) irony it deploys for narrative effect – all these and more give Ethan’s first “solo flight” without collaboration from his brother the kind of familiarity for audiences one can only get from four decades of previous exposure. Yet while “Drive-Away Dolls” might bear a lot of the trademark Coen touches, it’s also distinctively its own creature, with a more radical stylistic approach that one might glimpse in more flamboyant outliers to their joint filmography like “The Hudsucker Proxy” or cult-favorite “The Big Lebowski,” but which here brings its heightened sense of absurdity to the forefront in service of a story which is about, as much as it is anything, the role of causality in determining the circumstances and outcomes of our lives. In other words, it’s a movie which drives home (no pun intended) the point that – at least sometimes – our paths are determined by fate, no matter how much control we think we exert.

If you’re thinking that all this analysis doesn’t quite fit for a movie that presents itself as a madcap escapist romp, you’re not wrong; in spite of its ostensible B movie appeal, Coen’s movie – co-written with his wife, Tricia Cook – evokes some pretty weighty reflections, and while that might lend a more elevated layer to the film’s proceedings than we expect, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. We can be entertained and enlightened at the same time, after all.

Perhaps more detrimental to the movie’s effect, unfortunately, is its intricately-conceived plotting. Weaving together seemingly coincidental or irrelevant details into a chain of events that propels the story at every juncture, Coen and Cooke’s screenplay feels more devoted to cleverness than authenticity; outlandish plot twists pile up, under the guise of some esoteric cosmic significance, until they threaten to collapse in on themselves; in the end, for many viewers, it might all seem just a little too forced to be believable.

Fortunately, there are things to counterbalance that sense of overthinking that seems to permeate the script, most vital of which is the movie’s unambivalent embrace of its queer narrative. While it may borrow the familiar lesbians-on-the-run road tropes queer audiences have known for decades, it presents them in a story refreshingly devoid of shame or stigma; the sexuality of its heroines is something to be explored with nuance rather than subjected to the fetishized bias of the so-called “male gaze,” and it succeeds in giving us “tastefully” explicit scenes of same sex love that celebrate the joy of human connection rather than turning it into a voyeuristic spectacle. Even more important, perhaps, “Drive-Away Dolls” omits one particularly toxic cliché of queer stories on film by refuising to make its queer heroines into victims; they’re way too smart for that, and it makes us like them all the more, even if we don’t quite find ourselves absorbed in their story.

For this, full credit must go to Qualley and Viswanathan, who individually build fully relatable and multi-dimensional characters while also finding a sweet and believable chemistry within the awkwardness of finding a romantic love story between two friends – a complex species of relationship that surely deserves a more extensive and nuanced treatment than it gets space for in Coen’s film. As good as they are, though, it’s Feldstein’s relatively small supporting turn that steals the movie, with an unflinching-yet-hilarious tough-as-nails performance as Qualley’s ex that both acknowledges and undercuts the stereotype of the “angry lesbian” while striking an immensely satisfying blow for queer female empowerment. The always-stellar Domingo underplays his way through an effectively civilized supporting performance as the chief “heavy”, and Matt Damon makes a sly cameo as a conservative politician, while daddy-of-the-decade Pedro Pascal shows up for a brief but key role that gives winking service to fans who remember him from his “Game of Thrones” days – though to say more about any of those appearances would constitute a spoiler.

“Drive-Away Dolls” has been met with mixed reviews, and this one is no exception. There’s an unmistakable good intention behind it, and much to be appreciated in its sex-positive outlook and commitment to an unapologetically queer story and characters, but while its stylistic embellishments provide for campy enjoyment, it’s ultimately diffused by its own cleverness. Still, the queer joy that frequently peeks through it is more than enough reason to say that it’s a good choice for a fun date night at the movies.

At the end of the day, what more can you ask?