The vast body of Ryan Murphy’s work is exploitative, trashy garbage, with few exceptions. Monster: Dahmer found a unique balance between lurid spectacle and effective storytelling, delivering an engrossing experience. This feels like an inside joke or middle finger to Netflix, because Murphy can deliver quality, in spite of himself, here he actively chooses not to. His take on Ed Gein is grotesque and not in a good way. Murphy indulges his worst excesses, sexualizing and fetishizing Gein in nauseating manner. He plays beyond loose with facts and invents aspects and events wholesale. He makes no pretense of examining the crimes, and even tries to justify and legitimize Gein’s atrocities, likely enamoured with Charlie Hunnam’s abs. Hunnam himself goes hard with… choices, few of them good ones. His accent is questionable, and being charitable, he’s a mediocre actor.
It's a trap, the first episode is at least intriguing, but it relies less on Gein's story than on how Gein has informed pop culture. The crimes are incidental, victims forgotten, more a commentary on our exploitation of the crimes for sensationalized consumption as Murphy ironically engages in the most egregiously foul exploitation and sensationalism, all the while asking us to feel sympathy for the ‘monster’ even while committing montages of atrocity.
Honestly, this feels like Murphy putting all his mental ills on display. All his kinks, fetishes and lusts, skewed perspective on reality and pop culture mixed with indulgent and misogynistic fantasies. Fully on display for armchair analysts to speculate upon. Whether a definitive diagnosis can be reached, trying to unravel Murphy’s particular psychosis is vastly more entertaining than the series itself. All of the contributors to enabling Murphy’s atrocity here should take a long appraising look at themselves in the mirror and a scalding shower, but there will be no wiping away this stain. This is the worst. This is unwatchable. An insult to the truth, to the victims, to viewers, and by far the worst television of 2025.