When the first season of Ryan Murphy’s anthology series Monster debuted in September of 2022, it did so without fanfare or advance reviews. On the 21st day of that month, The Jeffrey Dahmer Story just fell into your Netflix queue with no warning. Initial critical reactions were beyond harsh. Many write-ups barely addressed the show’s dramatic effectiveness, instead criticizing its very existence. As time went on and more critics honestly engaged with the material, the reviews of Dahmer began to lift. I was one of those writers doing the lifting.
Dahmer pulled off one of the more remarkable tricks in recent television history. It took on the story of a depraved serial killer, explaining his history, and allowing for a humane view of how a sexually repressed boy from a broken home with deep-seated abandonment issues could turn into a brutal murderer. Despite throwing the word “Monster” into the show’s title, the series made Jeffrey Dahmer human, and if not exactly empathetic, at least understandable.
Moreover, each episode gave Dahmer’s victims genuine humanity. They weren’t there just to be killed horribly. They were there to let you know that those Dahmer preyed upon were real people with hopes and dreams. The episode focusing on deaf gay men of color is still one of the most profound hours of television I’ve seen in ages.
The show also delved into white privilege and the very real notion that Dahmer got away with his crimes for so long because most of the people he killed were poor young men of color. The performance by Evan Peters as Dahmer was absolutely fascinating as he played a dull man with no outwardly fascinating aspects, and somehow made him compelling.
After what felt like a messy detour with The Menendez Brothers (a season that would have fit better in Murphy’s American Crime Story anthology), this new season of Monster, focusing on another Wisconsin killer with arrested development, Ed Gein, would appear to be a return to the original formula that worked so surprisingly well with Dahmer.
Charlie Hunnam of Sons of Anarchy fame is probably not the first person one would think of to cast as Ed Gein. Gein was a mother-obsessed simpleton whose actions in the ‘40s and ‘50s inspired three different classic horror films (Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs). He was outwardly meek, and no one’s idea of a portrait of masculinity. Much like Peters as Dahmer, Hunnam fearlessly embraces the role of Gein down to his every mannerism, including Gein’s strange, high-pitched, childlike voice. It’s a brave performance by Hunnam that isn’t just outside of type, but also the sort of all-in effort that can open an actor to ridicule if it doesn’t land. Hunnam lands.
Because Gein was “only” found responsible for two deaths, the show has to do a lot of supposing to account for other killings committed by Gein in the series. Gein was at least loosely tied to seven other deaths and disappearances, and the series chooses to attach him directly to three of them. Season three also expands the role Adeline Watkins played in Gein’s life. Watkins was a very strange young woman who had some sort of relationship with Gein. Watkins’ claim that Gein proposed to her, she later retracted, along with numerous other statements. The Ed Gein Story takes Watkins’ original statements as fact, giving Gein a sounding board in the series. As Watkins, Suzanna Son gives the most successful performance in the show, even as it sometimes detracts from Gein himself.
The main problems with this iteration of Monster can be found elsewhere in the telling. As ambitious as it may be to include recreations of the making of Psycho, Texas Chainsaw, and Silence in this iteration of Monster, it’s more than the eight episodes of The Ed Gein Story can handle. Doubling down on tangents, the season also includes a parade of other murderers that Gein may or may not have influenced, including Jerry Brudos, Ted Bundy, Richard Speck, Ed Kemper, and, oh, what the hell, Charles Manson.
At times, the final episode of the season plays like a poor man’s Mindhunter, which does The Ed Gein Story no favors by reminding us how much better the actual Mindhunter is. There are not one, but two fantasy sequences where this gauntlet of ghouls, as mentioned above, fetes Gein as he is rolled down a hall in a wheelchair. What made Dahmer work so well was its tight screenplay and clear vision. The Ed Gein Story is sorely lacking in both categories.
The Jeffrey Dahmer Story didn’t go off on tangents the way Ed Gein does. That first season of Monster was genuinely invested in showing you how Dahmer’s childhood created a serial killer stew that would manifest in young adulthood. The Ed Gein Story basically tells you he had a crazy religious nut for a mom (an effective Laurie Metcalf) and an alcoholic father, and, well, here he is. It’s not nearly enough.
By not sticking with Gein, giving the viewer a fulsome backstory, and committing to its subject, The Ed Gein Story sets itself up for failure. The most unpleasant aspect of the season connects Gein’s inspiration to Ilse Koch, “The Bitch of Buchenwald,” a real-life Nazi who made lampshades from the flesh of dead Jews during the Holocaust. While it is true that Gein was impacted by comics sexualizing Ilse’s heinous endeavors, to actually create concentration camp sequences within the series is a weight The Ed Gein Story does not earn and cannot bear.
Additionally, the depiction of the making of Psycho, with Tom Hollander nailing Hitchcock (despite the distracting prosthetic jowls), and Joey Pollari as the poor, tortured Anthony Perkins, makes one wonder if The Ed Gein Story should have been abandoned altogether in favor of a telling of the genesis of the Hitchcock film. In just a handful of scenes, Pollari as Perkins gets deeper into the psychology of the closeted actor trapped by both the shame he felt over his sexuality and being typecast as Norman Bates than Hunnam is ever allowed to as Gein.
There is a superficiality to The Ed Gein Story that turns to rot over the course of the series. By blending in so many horror film subplots and the reverence paid to Gein by the killers that followed him, the storytelling becomes threadbare and more shallow than the graves Gein dug up and desecrated. What Dahmer so skillfully avoided, The Ed Gein Story does not: showcasing depravity for depravity’s sake. Where Dahmer demythologized its subject, Ed Gein does the opposite. I don’t believe for a second that the makers intended that result, but when working with such delicate and inflammatory subject matter, how you approach it is everything. In that regard, The Ed Gein Story fails in nearly every respect, even when individual scenes and performances are effective.
All episodes of Monster: The Ed Gein Story are available now to stream on Netflix.
