Photo Courtesy of NME

“Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” is currently the highest trending American TV show on Netflix, with 10 episodes released in late September. It has already drawn a vast audience base, with around 196.2 million watched hours.

It’s an American crime and horror story created by Ryan Murphy, starring Evan Peters as the notorious serial killer. 

Rather than focusing on Dahmer, the series investigates the racial injustices and police incompetence that allowed his heinous acts to continue for as long as they did.

The storyline is based mainly on facts, emphasizing well-known details about Dahmer’s troubled childhood, his long-held fascination with death, his extreme loneliness and the things he did in the hopes of keeping his victims close, even after death. 

The story jumps around in time, between Dahmer’s childhood, his adolescence, young adulthood, and present day. 

Fans of the show get a glimpse of Dahmer’s life in each episode: everything from his parents’ marital strife to his mother’s mental health issues, along with his difficulties fitting in and overall abandonment issues. Niecy Nash portrays Dahmer’s neighbor, Glenda Cleveland, who many admirably regard as a hero.

The storyline makes it clear to viewers what factors might have led Dahmer down his path. In one flashback scene, Jeff’s father, Lionel Dahmer (Richard Jenkins), is overjoyed when his son expresses an interest in studying roadkill. He believes his son wants a career in science, the field in which Lionel himself worked. His joy is offset by the knowledge that it was a clear sign of Dahmer’s future homicidal tendencies, and his father misread these signs. 

In another scene, Lionel mentions all of the medications Dahmer’s mother’s took while pregnant with him, implying that they may have altered his brain chemistry somehow.

The overt racism of the time is emphasized by several upsetting scenes, such as when police say a young Black accuser shouldn’t judge Dahmer based on prior arrests because “he knows how it is” (even though the young Black man in question had never before been arrested and rightfully resented the assumption), or when a judge shows no sympathy for the father of Dahmer’s victim Konerak Sinthasomphone’s (Kieran Tamondong), implying that he simply can’t understand him through his tears and thick Laotian accent. 

The story’s most significant focus is on police incompetence. Police officers frequently dismiss allegations against a young white male made by young Black men and women such as Cleveland. 

The most shocking scene occurs when Cleveland’s daughter and niece call the cops after discovering an escaped victim, Sinthasomphone, drugged and bleeding in the street. Instead of investigating the situation, such as checking Sinthasomphone’s identification and Dahmer’s previous record, the officers believed Dahmer’s story that the 14-year-old boy was his 19-year-old boyfriend who had too much to drink. 

Dahmer went on to murder the boy and five other people before being reported by others and eventually apprehended. The people who reported him were bothered by the smells and noises. 

After stretching out the story over 10 episodes, the ending falls short of providing satisfying closure. The information cards at the end of most true-crime series are one of the things fans look forward to the most. They indicate where various players are today and what has happened since. 

If you like true crime and are fascinated by serial killers, you shouldn’t wait to watch this show.