After its release last week, Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story has brought in a massive audience. True crime junkies, Evan Peters fans, and those generally interested in the story of the infamous serial killer flocked to Netflix to check out Ryan Murphy’s latest limited series. Like House of the Dragon for HBO and Rings of Power for Amazon Prime, Dahmer appears to be one of Netflix's biggest shows of the fall. This is because it has the most viewers for a show since Season 4 of Stranger Things dropped.
Dahmer ended up bringing in 196.2 million people over its first few days on Netflix, according to Deadline. Not many other shows have passed this threshold, putting Dahmer among the most popular shows of the year for the streamer. The only other shows with more viewers are Squid Game, All of Us Are Dead, Bridgerton Season 2, the limited series Inventing Anna, and the fourth season of Stranger Things.
The report also notes that of Ryan Murphy’s shows on Netflix (Like The Politician and Halston, among others), Dahmer is likely his most viewed.
This does not come as much of a surprise. Fans have had strong reactions to the show on social media, from crushing on Peters to passionately tweeting about why others should not be romanticizing the show. Twitter was also fired up when Peters’ was cast in the role a while back, so interest in this limited series about Dahmer has been around and growing for a long time.
For context, as to what so many people are watching, this show follows the victims of Jeffery Dahmer, and the killer’s time going in and out of the prison system. Both Peters and Murphy have discussed taking on such a difficult and heavy project and how they handled such sensitive content. Peter’s explained that Murphy set the rule that they would never tell the story from Dahmer’s point of view. He elaborated saying, they didn’t want to sympathize with him and they wanted to make sure what happened was portrayed in an authentic way.
Another reason people could be tuning into Dahmer is for its cast. Along with Peters, the show also stars Richard Jenkins, Molly Ringwald and Niecy Nash. I can imagine this project would have been hard to make for the cast. Peters confirmed this idea, talking about how prepping for the role was extremely difficult. Clearly, their hard work has paid off, as the show has had lots of responses from fans and critics, both positive and negative, and has brought in such a large audience.
It’s clear this show has made an impact on those who have seen it. If you are interested in watching Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, you can do so with a Netflix subscription.
