How Netflix's new Jeffrey Dahmer series fails his real victims (again)

The first episode of Netflix’s buzzy new true-crime series, “Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story,” unfolds like a horror movie. Dahmer (played by Evan Peters) prowls a nightclub primarily filled with young Black men. He approaches a trio of clubgoers and convinces one of them, Tracy Edwards (Shaun J. Brown), to come home with him. Dahmer promises Edwards a paid photoshoot, but back at his apartment he drugs Edwards before holding him at knifepoint and telling him that he’s going to eat his heart after he’s killed him. Their cat-and-mouse encounter unfolds with creeping dread; it’s impossible to know if or when Dahmer will strike with that knife.

The tide turns when Edwards fights his way to the front door and escapes. When he brings skeptical police officers to Dahmer’s doorstep, they discover the killer’s ever-growing house of horrors, including a vat full of body parts and a severed head in the freezer. We’re seeing the end of Dahmer’s spree of terror, and yet, that nightmarish opening sequence embodies the soul of this series.

We’re supposed to be afraid of Dahmer, dubbed the Milwaukee Monster, because he’s able to use his whiteness to hide in plain sight. No matter how much evidence accumulates against him, he’s able to escape. Instead of receiving jail time for sexually assaulting a teenage boy, he’s given probation the first time and then only sentenced to one year the second. Instead of being arrested when his neighbor Glenda Cleveland (played by a convincing Niecy Nash) finds a 14-year-old boy who has escaped his home, Dahmer convinces the police it’s just a lovers’ quarrel.

Dahmer clearly mastered the art of blending in — and using the incompetence of police officers to his benefit. That should terrify us now, just as it terrified the nation more than 30 years ago. And if cultivating and amplifying that terror is the goal of the Netflix series, then it has succeeded. The show had one of the biggest debut weeks in the streamer’s history and it has generated enough conversation to trend on Twitter. However, if the show’s goal is to re-center Dahmer’s victims — as showrunner Ryan Murphy claims — then it fails miserably.

If cultivating and amplifying that terror is the goal of the Netflix series, then it has succeeded.

To be fair, Murphy’s stated goal isn’t a bad one. America is a culture obsessed with serial killers, but often stories about their crimes focus on the “monsters” rather than the consequences. And while we still learn more than necessary about Dahmer’s background, the series does at least attempt to flip that common Hollywood script.

There’s an entire episode devoted to Dahmer’s neighbor Glenda, who repeatedly called the police about his suspicious behavior and the odd smell emanating from his apartment. An especially touching episode follows one of Dahmer’s victims, Tony Hughes (Rodney Burford), who was deaf and just seeking friendship when he crossed paths with the cannibal. In this way, “Dahmer” is attempting to remake the serial killer narrative into something more compassionate. But why do we need to re-create (and profit from) these murders in order to feel empathy for Dahmer’s victims, especially when said victims were primarily LGBTQ+ men of color?

It's the same question that some family members of Dahmer’s real-life victims are asking today. Rita Isbell, the sister of victim Errol Lindsey, told Insider that neither Netflix nor the show’s producers reached out to the families before their personal tragedies were trotted out (again) for ratings. “It’s sad that they’re just making money off of this tragedy,” she said. “That’s just greed.”

And she isn’t the only relative speaking out. Eric Perry, another Lindsey family member, told the Los Angeles Times, “I want people to understand this is not just a story or historical fact, these are real people’s lives. [Lindsey] was someone’s son, someone’s brother, someone’s father, someone’s friend that was ripped from [our] lives.” To Isbell and Perry, these gruesome re-enactments are clearly re-traumatizing. It’s hard to see how that price is worth it.

Americans don’t need more “awareness” of serial killers. And in the case of a crime that occurred so many years ago, it’s hard to see what the series realistically would accomplish in the context of police accountability.

But there are even darker consequences for shows like “Dahmer": serial killer stans. In the days since its release, a growing contingent of TikTok users appear to be romanticizing the killer and feeling sorry for him. He’s not that bad. Maybe he was just misunderstood! And by the way, did you see how cute his glasses are?

In the wake of the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard defamation case, and the way that trial was sensationalized on TikTok especially, this feels like a very predictable outcome. Serial killers like Ted Bundy have also been widely romanticized and fetishized by Hollywood over the past few years. Showrunners shouldn’t be surprised by what is happening here (and maybe they were even counting on it).

We may never be able to divorce ourselves from the true crime phenomenon. And to be fair, it’s not inherently a bad thing — after all, Adnan Syed is free today partially because of the success of “Serial.” But we do need to approach these stories with self-awareness, and true (not feigned) empathy. We need to be honest about the consequences of retelling real tragedies. And, above all else, we need deference for the wishes of the families most impacted by these crimes. That’s what real humanizing looks like.