Netflix’s Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story launched in September 2022 and almost immediately became one of the platform’s most-watched series of all time. Created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, the ten-episode limited series approaches one of America’s most notorious serial killers not through the typical true crime lens of investigation and capture but through the experiences of his victims, their families, and the neighbors and authorities whose failures allowed Dahmer’s crimes to continue for over a decade.
The show’s reception was split along a fault line that runs through the entire true crime genre. Viewers who engaged with the series found it an affecting examination of how racism, homophobia, and institutional indifference created the conditions for Dahmer to operate unchecked. The families of Dahmer’s victims were largely critical, arguing that the show retraumatized them without their consent and that Netflix profited from their pain while they received nothing. Both positions have merit, and the tension between them defines the show’s legacy as much as any creative decision Murphy and Brennan made.
Evan Peters and the Victims’ Stories Finally Told
Peters’s performance as Dahmer is the show’s most technically impressive achievement. He plays the role with an unnerving stillness, avoiding the scenery-chewing that lesser portrayals of serial killers often indulge in. His Dahmer is quiet, awkward, and superficially polite, and the ordinariness Peters brings to the role is precisely what makes it disturbing. You understand, watching him, how this man convinced people to trust him. There’s no mystification of evil here, just a deeply damaged person whose damage manifested in horrific ways and whom society failed to stop.
The show’s most powerful episodes are those focused on Dahmer’s victims and the people around them. Episode 6, “Silenced,” which centers on Tony Hughes, a deaf man who was one of Dahmer’s victims, is devastating in its portrayal of a full human life that the true crime genre typically reduces to a name on a list. The episode builds a complete picture of who Hughes was before depicting his murder, and the effect is to make the audience feel the specific, individual loss rather than processing it as one event in a catalog of horrors.
Niecy Nash’s performance as Glenda Cleveland, Dahmer’s neighbor who repeatedly called police to report suspicious activity and was repeatedly ignored, provides the show’s moral backbone. Cleveland’s frustration, her growing horror, and her fury at a system that wouldn’t listen to a Black woman in a predominantly Black neighborhood give the show its most potent commentary on why Dahmer was able to kill for so long.
The show’s depiction of systemic failures is thorough and damning. The police officers who returned a drugged, bleeding victim to Dahmer’s apartment because they believed Dahmer’s story about a domestic dispute over the victim’s frantic attempts to communicate what was happening represent a catastrophic failure of every system meant to protect vulnerable people. The show depicts this incident with appropriate anger.
The Exploitation Question and Structural Problems
The fundamental tension the show never resolves is whether it’s possible to tell these stories ethically while packaging them as entertainment on the world’s largest streaming platform. The victims’ families made their objections clear and public, and those objections don’t disappear because the show has good intentions. Monster frames itself as centering victims’ perspectives, but it also needed Evan Peters playing a serial killer to get made and watched, and the marketing leaned heavily into the horror elements.
Structurally, ten episodes is too many for the story the show wants to tell. The middle section drags, repeating patterns of victimization that, while historically accurate, create a numbing effect that works against the show’s stated goal of humanizing each victim. Some episodes feel like they exist to fill a content quota rather than because the story demanded them.
Murphy’s directorial instincts, which tend toward the baroque, are mostly restrained here, but there are moments where the show lingers on details that feel more like provocation than purpose. The line between depicting horror to illuminate its context and depicting horror because it’s compelling television is difficult to walk, and Monster occasionally stumbles across it.
The show’s later episodes, dealing with the trial and its aftermath, are less effective than the pre-capture material. The courtroom scenes feel rushed compared to the careful character work of the stronger episodes, and the show’s final meditation on Dahmer’s legacy doesn’t quite land with the weight it’s reaching for.
True Crime’s Responsibility to Its Subjects
Monster’s greatest contribution to the true crime conversation isn’t the story it tells but the debate it provoked about who benefits when real tragedies become content. The show became a cultural phenomenon, generating millions of hours of viewing, social media discourse, and secondary content. Meanwhile, the families of victims reported receiving no compensation and experiencing renewed harassment from online true crime enthusiasts. Whether you believe the show is a thoughtful examination of systemic failure or a handsomely produced exploitation of real suffering, the conversation it generated about the ethics of the genre is more valuable than the show itself.
Should You Watch Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story?
If you can engage with true crime dramatization while keeping its ethical complications in mind, the show offers some of the most powerful individual episodes in the genre. Episode 6 alone justifies the series’ existence as a piece of storytelling, and Evan Peters and Niecy Nash both deliver performances of genuine distinction. The show’s examination of how racism and homophobia enabled Dahmer is important and effectively communicated.
Skip it if the objections of victims’ families matter more to you than the show’s artistic merits, which is a completely legitimate position. If graphic depictions of violence are something you avoid, know that the show includes them, though less frequently than you might expect. If you find the true crime entertainment genre fundamentally problematic, Monster won’t change your mind. And if ten episodes feels like too much time to spend with this subject matter, your instinct is probably correct.
The Verdict on Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story
Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story is a well-acted, intermittently powerful true crime drama that is most effective when it focuses on the lives stolen and the systems that failed to prevent the killing. Evan Peters gives a performance of unnerving restraint, and the episodes centered on victims and neighbors achieve something rare for the genre. But the show cannot escape the contradiction at its core, that it profits from the pain it purports to examine, and the objections of the real people affected by these events linger over every episode. It is a show worth watching and worth questioning in equal measure.