Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story Review

Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan open in 1991, on the night Tracy Edwards got out of Dahmer's apartment while his neighbour Glenda Cleveland complained about the smell, then go back through an Ohio childhood and the killings at his grandmother's house in West Allis. The last episodes belong to the aftermath: the families, the lawsuits, Lionel Dahmer's guilt and the prison where Dahmer died.

Evan Peters, who rehearsed with weights on his hands to get Dahmer's stiff walk, is flat, slow and horribly plausible, and won the Golden Globe. Niecy Nash won the Emmy as Cleveland, whose calls about the boy she tried to save go nowhere, and Richard Jenkins is desolate as the father. The best hour is the sixth, Silenced, about Tony Hughes, a deaf Black man; Daniel Fienberg rightly called it the template the whole show should have followed.

The trouble is the rest. It claims to be about the victims and a racist, apathetic police force, yet spends most of its time in Dahmer's rooms, and victims' relatives, Tony Hughes's mother among them, objected to how their stories were told. Rotten Tomatoes' consensus found it tipping into queasy exploitation. It became one of Netflix's most watched series and then a franchise, which is part of the case against it.