This article discusses the full season of Monster: The Ed Gein Story.
Somewhere around the halfway point of Monster: The Ed Gein Story, the title character stares into the camera and warns: “You shouldn’t be watching this.” In a literal sense, he’s talking to a pair of strangers who have interrupted him in the bloody aftermath of a murder. But the head-on closeup makes it clear that the so-called Butcher of Plainfield, played with eerie gentleness by Sons of Anarchy star Charlie Hunnam, is also speaking to his rapt audience of Netflix viewers. Then he revs up his chainsaw and starts chasing the men. Of course, we keep watching. In the next scene, Ed treats his first fan—his sometime girlfriend Adeline Watkins—to the spectacle of a dead, nude woman, eviscerated and strung up like a carcass in a slaughterhouse.
It’s a short sequence that might easily get lost amid the parade of violence, gore, warped sexuality, and heavy-handed social commentary that makes up this and every season of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s Monster anthology. Yet it encapsulates the creators’ attitude towards the millions who devour this kind of entertainment. Like the two previous installments, on Jeffrey Dahmer and the Menendez brothers, Ed Gein retells in lurid—and largely fantastical—detail the legend of a notorious murderer, with the aim of discerning what our collective obsession with and inevitable misunderstanding of each case says about society. In taking on Gein, America’s ur-serial killer and the inspiration for some of our most disturbing works of art (not to mention crimes), Monster seizes the opportunity to indict the very audience that made it one of TV’s most popular shows. The upshot of this contempt is a season that layers hypocrisy as well as sanctimony over the grubby, tedious nihilism that made Dahmer so miserable to watch.
Disdain for the viewer has been part of Monster’s DNA since the beginning. Each of its first two seasons opens with…
