Monster: The Ed Gein Story
Netflix
Ryan Murphy’s Monster series, chronicling the tales of famous killers, has never been a critic-pleaser, but Monster: The Ed Gein Story? The show has just hit a new low-water mark on Netflix.
Now that more reviews have come in, the Rotten Tomatoes score of Ed Gein has sunk more than 20%, and now stands at just a 23% critic score. That’s below the previous two Monster entries, and also Netflix’s True Crime serial killer series, Conversations with a Killer. Here’s how the list breaks down:
- Conversations with a Killer: The Son of Sam Tapes – 100% critic score, N/A audience score
- Conversations with a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes – 86% critic score, 83% audience score
- Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes – 58% critic score, 76% audience score
- Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story – 57% critic score, 82% audience score
- Monster: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story – 45% critic score, 58% audience score
- Monster: The Ed Gein Story – 23% critic score, 54% audience score
There’s also a Conversations with a Killer for Jeffrey Dahmer, but that wasn’t reviewed enough to have a critic score. It did have an 80% audience score. I thought about putting Mindhunter on here, another serial killer-focused series, but that almost felt like cheating, given how great we all know it is.
As you can see, The Ed Gein Story is well below any of the others, and in addition to the lowest critic score, also has the lowest audience score. That would imply that it’s not likely that it ends up having enormous viewership like Dahmer did, which is one of Netflix’s most-viewed shows ever.
The Ed Gein Story is not good. I just spent the weekend watching it, and it’s a rather bizarre portrayal of the man, making one of the most brutal killers in history weirdly sympathetic due to his schizophrenia diagnosis. Though of course, millions of people with schizophrenia do not collect heads or genitals or make lamps and chairs out of skin. Plus, the entire thing fictionalizes so much that it rarely seems like anything approaching what the real story behind Gein might have been.
Just because the Monster series is generally pretty bad, that is not stopping Netflix and Ryan Murphy from making more. Before Ed Gein even aired, Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story was announced, switching to a female killer this time. She is the famed axe murderer who lived all the way back in the 19th century, famously accused of killing her father and stepmother with an axe, though she was acquitted. Not a serial killer like Dahmer or Gein, but this will be more like the Menendez season, which also featured parental murder. Ella Beatty, daughter of Annette Bening and Warren Beatty, will play Borden, and she’s only been acting since 2024.
Ed Gein is a big, big miss, but as of now, it’s still #1 on Netflix. We’ll see how long audiences tolerate it.
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Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2025/10/07/netflixs-monster-ed-gein-sets-an-unfortunate-rotten-tomatoes-record/
