Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, about a serial killer who feasted on his victims, has become one of Netflix’s most popular shows ever. The series follows the true story of Jeffrey Dahmer, one of the most monstrous figures in American history, as portrayed by Evan Peters in the role of the serial murderer known as the Milwaukee Cannibal.
Streaming makes it more difficult to gauge a show’s success compared to traditional cable, where ratings are based on how many viewers tuned in for a new episode.
The first advantage is that viewers may tune in whenever they like rather than being restricted to the release date and hour. Also, since some series are longer than others, total viewing hours are not a reliable measure of popularity. Season 4 of Stranger Things, for example, included longer episodes, increasing the series’ cumulative runtime for viewers who committed to the entire season. In this light, one of the most telling indicators of a show’s success is the ratio of total viewer hours to the show’s overall duration. By so doing, we can get a clearer picture of how many homes really watched a given programme.
Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, for example, has been seen for 496,000,000 hours in just two weeks. When you divide that number by the show’s overall length of 8.8 hours, you get 56 million homes interested in Peters’ interpretation of the cannibal killer. Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story is the second most viewed English-language series in a week, after Stranger Things 4. That huge number is a testament to the show’s excellence and to the widespread interest in serial killers. Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, delves into why Dahmer went unpunished for so long for his murders against homosexual men and people of colour.
At the time of his arrest in 1991, Dahmer was one of the most prolific serial killers in American history, having killed at least 17 people between 1978 and 1991. Niecy Nash co-stars as Dahmer’s neighbour Glenda Cleveland, who tries to catch the police’s attention initially. In addition to Richard Jenkins, Penelope Ann Miller, Molly Ringwald, Michael Learned, Colin Ford, and Shaun J. Brown also star. The Netflix original documentary Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story premiered on September 21.