Ian Brennan writes the line that gets the laugh and, more often than not, the line that stings. Across one good season of Glee that was enough; across eight hours of Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story it is not.
Fi1m perspective
Nearly everything worth quoting from the first season of Glee (2009) came out of Sue Sylvester's mouth, and most of it was written by Ian Brennan. Jane Lynch's Sue insults a child, a colleague or an entire town in one clean sentence and has moved on before anyone can object. Brennan has said the lines are "the mean things that pop into the back of your mind that you sometimes want to say but don’t", and that is exactly how they sound: not jokes so much as the thing a decent person swallows. It is a gift, and it is a small one.
He came to it as an actor. Brennan trained at Second City and worked on Chicago stages before writing Glee in 2005, as a film, out of his own time in a show choir in suburban Illinois. Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk turned it into a series that ran from 2009 to 2015, and we still think the first season was the sharpest, oddest comedy on American television that year; the five that followed forgot which parts of the programme were the good ones. Since then he has rarely written without Murphy: Scream Queens (2015), The Politician, Hollywood (2020), Halston (2021) and, from 2022, the Monster anthology, which has gone from Jeffrey Dahmer to the Menendez brothers to Ed Gein to Lizzie Borden.
That last turn, from comedy to true crime, is where his habits show. A one-liner is a thing you land and leave. A murder case is a thing you have to sit in, and Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story (2026) shows what happens when Brennan has one idea, that Lizzie was a good woman who was pushed, and eight episodes to fill with it. He states it in the first hour and repeats it for seven more. The performers do the arguing he will not: Rebecca Hall plays Abby Borden as frightened rather than wicked, working against a script that has drawn her as the villain, and Vicky Krieps, as the maid Bridget, is truer every time she is on screen. We were bored during the cutaways to Sarah Paulson's Aileen Wuornos in Florida, and then annoyed, because each one arrived just as Fall River was getting interesting and we could see the better series being pushed aside to make room.
What he keeps from his acting years is an ear. People in a Brennan script talk the way people talk, and when he lets them be unpleasant, as the first Monster season let Dahmer be, the writing holds. What he does not yet have is patience: the willingness to let a case stay a case, or to give the other side a lawyer. Give him a cruel woman and a short scene and he is still one of the sharpest writers working in American television. Give him a hatchet and eight hours and he repeats himself.
The Monster anthology goes on. We would trade the next murderer for one more Sue Sylvester.
Biography
Ian Brennan is an American screenwriter, director and producer. Born on 23 April 1978 in Mount Prospect, Illinois, he studied theatre at Loyola University Chicago and began his career as an actor in Chicago and New York before turning to writing.
Brennan co-created the musical comedy series Glee (2009) with Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk. He contributed as writer and director on multiple episodes and originally conceived the project as a film script drawing on his own high school show choir experiences.
He created the Netflix true-crime anthology series Monster, serving as writer and showrunner on Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story (2026).
