Monster Season 3’s Ed Gein Hypocrisy Exposes The Ryan Murphy Genius Myth

Heads up: spoilers for Monster: The Ed Gein Story.

Ryan Murphy is back with another Monster season, and this time he has picked a real doozy: Ed Gein. The Gein case is murky to begin with — the man was an unreliable narrator of his own horrors — which gives any dramatist a wide lane for invention. Murphy, famously not shy with creative license, takes the wheel and floors it. The result? Easily the franchise’s goriest, queasiest outing yet — and one that keeps telling us to think about our obsession with true crime while also giving us... a lot more true crime to obsess over.

The pitch this time: look in the mirror

Co-creator Ian Brennan told Variety the show is as much about us as it is about Gein:

'His story was bent and twisted, like a Silly Putty image. And the most interesting layer was turning the camera on ourselves – on Ryan and I, and on the audience. Oh, look, we’re doing the same thing. We’re obsessed with this guy.'

The series really leans into that. In the trailer, Charlie Hunnam’s Gein literally addresses the viewer:

'You’re the one who can’t look away.'

And in episode 4, when two deer hunters wander into his barn and catch him running a chainsaw, he tells them — and us —

'You shouldn’t be watching this.'

Four episodes in, the meta winking starts to feel like it is repeating itself without adding much. We get it: we are complicit. Now what?

About that moral high ground

After two controversial seasons (Jeffrey Dahmer, then the Menendez brothers) where the absence of victims’ families in the process was a major sticking point, a Gein season might seem like safer terrain. Maybe. It is early to say whether that problem resurfaces. But the show does something else that is hard to ignore: it scolds the true-crime machine while powering it.

Murphy himself told Netflix’s Tudum:

'The thesis statement of every season is: are monsters born or are they made? I think in Ed’s case, it’s probably a little of both.'

Fair question. But if Monster: The Ed Gein Story is meant to be a sharp nature-vs-nurture study, it does not play like one. The word 'monster' gets hammered so often it starts to clang; subtle this is not. The show also points out, correctly, that Hollywood profited from Gein’s myth without putting his name on the marquee — think Norman Bates in Psycho and Leatherface in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre — and yet this series is unmistakably doing the same thing, just with the name front and center. That is the paradox the season never reconciles: can you critique our appetite for these stories while also serving up a buffet?

When the show swings for the fences, it often whiffs

The premiere actually shows a little promise. Then episode 2 arrives with a jaw-dropping detour: concentration camp prisoners chasing Gein across his Wisconsin farm like a pulp horror set piece. The tone goes haywire, and the season never quite recovers. Later, Gein has scenes with Nazi war criminal Ilse Koch. At one point she tells him:

'Don’t let anyone call you a monster. You are a human being.'

Meanwhile, the series does not shy away from the grisliest details of his crimes. In the final stretch, it even flirts with a late-life redemption arc: an older Gein realizes others have been telling his story for him, and in a dreamlike sequence at his psychiatric hospital he crosses paths with Charles Manson, Ed Kemper, Jerry Brudos, and Richard Speck — as if he is communing with future monsters he supposedly inspired. The dialogue throughout is clunky enough that big swings play unintentionally funny. By the end, you are left wondering what Murphy was trying to say, beyond 'we watch this stuff a lot.'

Inside baseball and 'did they really go there?' moments

• Episode 4 breaks the fourth wall twice (trailer stare and the barn chainsaw scene) to remind us we are watching — and watching is the point.
• There is an 'actor prep' thread where Anthony Perkins, gearing up for Psycho, is shown multiple vulvas — the same ones cops later find when Gein’s home is raided. Yes, that happens. Yes, it is exactly as gross as it sounds.
• Frank (Charlie Hall) hallucinates Gein carving up his mother (Lesley Manville) like a Thanksgiving turkey.
• Gein imagines having sex with Ilse Koch, but the partner is actually a corpse. That one is going to live rent-free in the 'too far' file.
• Episode 2’s concentration camp prisoner chase across Gein’s farm is so misjudged it belongs in a different, worse show.

The carnival after the crimes

One thing the season nails: the circus that popped up around Gein’s property after his arrest. There is a literal sign on the driveway inviting people to tour:

'See the Plainfield butcher’s actual home!'

Visitors gawk. They spot blood stains and human hair, recoil, and then lean in closer. The show presents this as the true-crime machine roaring to life — and, to its point, we are participating by watching the series at all. It would almost be funny if Murphy popped up in a cameo to sell tickets on the lawn. That is the mic-drop the season thinks it pulls off, but does not.

Is it the 'best season'?

Brennan thinks so:

'I think this is the best season of the three, and I think it’s going to blow people’s socks off.'

Plenty of viewers are clearly into Monster; Netflix would not keep ordering more otherwise. But for me, this one is the most sensational and the least insightful — a lot of guts, not much brain. The show says it wants us to examine our fixation with killers. By the fourth 'you shouldn’t be watching this,' I was mostly wondering why I still was.

Where it’s streaming

Monster: The Ed Gein Story is now streaming on Netflix.