Jenna Bush Hager Jokes She Watches Monsters for ‘Comfort’

Jenna Bush Hager has had her eyes glued to season 2 of Netflix’s Monsters.

“I’ve been watching [Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menéndez Story] for comfort. I’ve been watching it for comfort,” Bush Hager, 42, joked on the Thursday, November 7, episode of Today With Hoda & Jenna. “I texted [my husband] Henry [Hager] yesterday, I’m like, ‘Get home from work. We’ve got to watch the Menéndez bros. I want to feel good. C’mon, let’s go!’”

She went on to explain that she and Hager, 46, “watch everything in captions ’cause we’re 90 years old,” much to her cohost Hoda Kotb’s confusion.

“Is it distracting to be reading while the plot’s [happening]?” Kotb, 60, asked. “You know, the cinematographer who spent so much time working on that?”

Bush Hager hilariously replied: “[The captions are] at the very bottom. All it’s covering is the Menéndez brothers’ abs.”

Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menéndez Story is a follow-up to the Ryan Murphy anthology series Monster, which starred Evan Peters as the infamous serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. The show’s second installment follows the true crime case of Erik (Cooper Koch) and Lyle Menéndez (Nicholas Alexander Chavez), who were sentenced to life in prison without parole for the 1989 murder of their parents, José and Kitty Menéndez, played in the show by Javier Bardem and Chloë Sevigny, respectively. (The show’s upcoming third installment, The Original Monster, will star Charlie Hunnam as Ed Gein.)

Monsters season 2 premiered on September 19 and garnered 2.7. billion minutes watched within its first week on Netflix, per Variety. Despite its popularity, the show has also faced backlash from the Menéndez family and the brothers themselves for the show’s portrayal of the case’s events and trial.

“I think that story is complicated. I’m thrilled with the reaction to it. I’m really thrilled with how people are responding to the performances, particularly of Cooper and Nicholas who really killed themselves to do justice to those boys,” Murphy, 58, said of the show in an October interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “I think Cooper and Nicholas are much more empathetic toward the Menéndez brothers than I am, but good. There’s room for all points of view.”

The series has also sparked new interest in the Menéndez brothers’ case, prompting Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón to declare last month that the siblings be resentenced and have their sentences reduced. Mark Geragos, a lawyer for Erik, 53, and Lyle, 56, told TMZ on October 29 that he will file a petition to California governor Gavin Newsom seeking clemency for the brothers.

Gascón, 70, lost his L.A. District Attorney reelection campaign earlier this month. His upcoming replacement, Nathan Hochman, declared he will take on the Menéndez case if a decision is not made before he takes office.

“The way I will handle the Menéndez case is the way I’d handle every case,” Hochman, 60, told TMZ on Wednesday, November 6. “I will thoroughly go over the facts and the law. … Certainly it will have a high priority as will other similarly situated cases will have a high priority on my desk.”