Netflix subscribers appear to have a strong interest in Netflix’s latest series chronicling the unspeakable horrors that Jeffrey Dahmer inflicted upon victims and their families. Monster has topped Netflix’s English TV Top 10 list for the third week in a row. Overall, subscribers have viewed the series for a combined 701.37 million hours. Stranger Things 4 is the only English TV series to garner more viewers in a 30-day period. Simply put, Netflix’s depiction of the serial killer has become the streaming service’s second most popular English TV series of all time.
While Monster has been a major hit among viewers, those closes to the real-life tragedies that the families of the victims continue to relive find the series to be appalling.
“I’m not telling anyone what to watch. I know true crime media is huge [right now]. If you’re actually curious about the victims, my family [is] pissed about this show. It’s retraumatizing [us] over and over again, and for what?” Eric Perry, a relative of Errol Lindsey, one of Dahmer’s victims, tweeted.
“It brought back all the emotions I was feeling back then,” Lindsey’s sister, Rita, wrote in an essay for Insider.
Despite criticism, there are those who continue to defend the series. Nancy Glass, who interviewed Dahmer in 1993, argued that the series does not romanticize the serial killer.
“I think that what they do is sort of satisfy our curiosity about how could something like this really happen. Everybody wants to know… how could it happen? Could I spot this? How do I avoid this?” she asked during an interview with Fox News.
“I know that that may seem bizarre, but I think it’s more about morbid curiosity than romanticism.”
Netflix subscribers have also shown an interest in shows like Conversations With a Killer and The John Wayne Gacy Tapes. The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes has also risen to the upper echelon of the Netflix charts within the last month.
