User:Kjw08/Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story

Audience viewership[edit]

The series rose to the number-one spot on Netflix in the first week of its release. In the second week of its release, Netflix announced that Dahmer was its ninth most popular English-language TV show of all time, with 56 million households having viewed all 10 episodes. The series remained number-one for weeks and became Netflix’s second most-viewed English Netflix series of all time, and the fourth highest across any language with 701.37 million hours viewed in 21 days. The series amassed more than 865 million hours viewed in the first 28 days of its release.

Dahmer debuted at number-one on the Nielsen Top 10 streaming chart by garnering more than 3.6 billion minutes of viewing for the week of September 19–25, placing it 10th on the all-time list for single-week viewership. The following week, it jumped to No. 7 on the all-time list with 4.4 billion minutes viewed. The series topped Nielsen's streaming chart for the third consecutive week with 2.3 billion viewing minutes.

Jermey dick published an article talking about how on "October 3rd through the 9th the views of the Dahmer series made up to 205 million hours streamed" into watching the show for that time period, overall making it up to "701 million hours watched globally".

Critical response[edit]

The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reported a 62% approval rating with an average rating of 6.3/10, based on 26 critic reviews. The website's critics consensus reads, "While Monster is seemingly self-aware of the peril in glorifying Jeffrey Dahmer, creator Ryan Murphy's salacious style nevertheless tilts this horror story into the realm of queasy exploitation." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned a score of 45 out of 100 based on 8 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".

Kayla Cobb at Decider said the show "isn't just well directed, written, and acted. It's rewriting what a crime drama can look like if we stop glorifying murderers and start focusing more on systematic failures." Caroline Framke of Variety argues that the show "simply can't rise to its own ambition of explaining both the man and the societal inequities his crimes exploited without becoming exploitative in and of itself." Dan Fienberg of The Hollywood Reporter praises episode 6 ("Silenced") as "easily the best episode of the series, an uncomfortably sweet and sad hour of TV that probably should have been the template for the entire show [and]...in placing a Black, deaf, gay character at the center of the narrative, the series is giving voice to somebody whose voice has too frequently been excluded from gawking serial killer portraits."

On September 23, 2022, Netflix removed the series' "LGBTQ" tag after backlash on social media.

Some relatives of the victims criticized the show.

Although there is a big demand for more shows like Dahmers' show, one of the newspaper on Buzzfeednews reveals that there is some backlash from the victims that actually went through the pain that Dahmer has caused them, and had to relive it because of the show. Kelsey Weekman, the reporter for this newspaper, also stated that the real life victims family were not told about the show or "a part of production" before it was put on Netflix. One of the victims family member (Isabelle), felt like the show wasn't beneficial and that it was "sad that Netflix is making money off this tragedy" and "the families haven't made any money off the show. Another report from Los Angeles Times, suggested that people started to feel like the show was for the purposes of "entertainment commercialized tragedy". Another Buzzfeednews article published by Ellen Durney reveals that Netflix posted on Twitter that there will be a second Dahmer series coming out, and the audience is feeling that there is starting to be a "commercialization of murders" . This information reveals that some audience members feel that the creation of shows like Jefferey Dahmer is idolizing these serial killers, and furthermore "forcing the victims family to relive trauma."