Though the first season of the anthology series Monster, produced for Netflix by Ryan Murphy, had its lurid aspects – a hunky, lustily filmed Jeffery Dahmer (Evan Peters) doing wicked things in the night – it did, admirably, try to focus as much attention on the victims of Wisconsin’s most notorious serial killer as it did on the man doing the murdering. Season two of the series turned away from that drab gloom and focused, with at least some sensitivity, on the sensational trials of the Menendez Brothers in sunny California.
Season three, the Ed Gein Story, returns to midwest murk and, especially in its early episodes, makes far less of an effort to do anything other than grimly titillate. The show’s thesis makes some sense: Ed Gein, who murdered at least two people and stole the bodies of many more from their graves, was an object of intense fascination in the middle of the 20th century, his crimes serving as inspiration for Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Silence of the Lambs and, in creator Ian Brennan’s argument, other budding serial killers. Thus Monster can depict Gein’s squalid deeds in gruesome detail while also saying something big about American culture, an analysis that might justify the show’s prurient interest in Gein’s graverobbing, necrophilia and other aberrant behavior.
