"Monster" Lost Its Edge. Here's How It Gets It Back.

When Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story landed on Netflix, it was deeply uncomfortable to watch, and that discomfort was the point. It felt like appointment television: heavy, unflinching, and trusting its audience to sit with real moral complexity.

Three seasons later, after finishing the Lizzie Borden story, I'm left feeling the series has drifted somewhere quite different.

The Shift:

Somewhere after Season 1, Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan pivoted. Instead of profiling a textbook predator, the series began examining how abuse, severe mental illness, and social cages push complicated people toward violence. That's a legitimate and interesting idea. In practice, though, it has traded true horror for tragic psychological drama, and the subjects have become easier targets for easier thesis statements.

Season 2 followed the Menendez brothers: two traumatized young men who committed a single act of violence against their abusers. There was no pattern and no hunting.

Season 3 took on Ed Gein, and it's the strongest of the post-Dahmer arc. It earned its place. Gein was a deeply isolated, mentally ill grave robber linked to two murders, and the season tells his story honestly, horrifying and quietly sad in equal measure. It works as a portrait of untreated mental illness and the era that failed him, and its connection to the horror films he inspired, like Psycho and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, gives it a cultural dimension the other recent seasons lack. It isn't Dahmer, but it carries real weight.

Season 4 now brings us Lizzie Borden, told as a gothic tale of 19th-century female rage and patriarchal constraint, with a somewhat empowering, revenge-driven lens. The series itself acknowledges her acquittal, and that's where the premise gets shaky. Dahmer, the Menendez brothers, and Gein all had their crimes established in court. With Borden, we simply don't know whether she did it. That pushes this season further into theory and subjective storytelling than any before it, and further still from the grounded weight of Season 1.

The ones they're avoiding:

The creators have been clear about who they won't cover. Murphy has said he doesn't see a larger social theme in Ted Bundy's crimes, arguing that "It doesn't ask you any questions about society." Brennan has similarly said Bundy's story comes down to sadism and sexual violence, without a mind the writers want to get inside.

I'd respectfully push back, at least on Bundy. His story is arguably one of the sharpest possible critiques of institutional privilege. He slipped past investigators in the 1970s in part because the establishment of the time struggled to picture a clean-cut, charming law student as a killer. That's a question about society if ever there was one.

John Wayne Gacy is a tougher case. His story does expose police indifference toward missing marginalized boys, but that failure sits outside of him. It explains how he went uncaught, not who he was, and ten hours of that could easily become bleak without becoming illuminating.

Two directions that could bring the edge back

What made Season 1 work was that the social critique and the genuinely unsettling predator were intertwined. Two subjects could offer that same tension.

Charles Manson and the Family. The approach here would focus on the group rather than buying into Manson's self-mythology. It becomes a study of shared delusion, cult conformity, and the dark underside of the '60s counterculture. Layer in the political chaos and paranoia of the era, and you get a story about how vulnerable young people were stripped of their empathy, one piece at a time.

Ed Kemper. Told chronologically from a near-first-person perspective, the way Dahmer was, this season could let viewers inhabit his world without a comforting filter. His story indicts the juvenile psychiatric system that he manipulated into releasing him, and it explores severe maternal emotional abuse. Kemper also understood his own depravity with unnerving clarity. Watching that unfold would force the audience to wrestle with their empathy before his sheer physical menace takes over. Mindhunter fans already know how magnetic he can be on screen.

What I hope Monster remembers:

The best true-crime storytelling, like Mindhunter and Monster's own first season, respects its audience enough to hand them something difficult. Safe, broad-appeal subjects might be easier to market, but I suspect they're less likely to leave a mark. My hope is that Monster, and Netflix in general, finds its way back to the raw, uncomfortable challenge that made it matter in the first place.