Ryan Murphy’s Most Polarizing Franchise Just Took Back the Streaming Crown
Ryan Murphy’s Netflix juggernaut Monster has stormed back to the top of the global streaming charts. FlixPatrol reports Monster: The Ed Gein Story, which dropped Oct. 3, is now the No. 1 show worldwide, edging out Wayward, House of Guinness, Alice in Borderlands and more.
Netflix dusted off Ryan Murphy's Monster playbook again, and surprise: it shot straight back to number one worldwide. Love it or hate it, the new season, Monster: The Ed Gein Story, is the biggest thing on the platform right now.
The quick reality check
Per FlixPatrol, the Ed Gein season, which dropped on October 3, has jumped to the top spot globally, edging out buzzy competitors like Wayward, House of Guinness, and Alice in Borderlands. This franchise already proved itself with the Dahmer season and the Menendez brothers chapter, and it clearly still has a grip on the charts.
Critics, though, are not exactly cheering. The show sits at 48% on Rotten Tomatoes, while IMDb users skew kinder at 7.8/10. The push-pull is familiar by now: huge audience interest vs. ongoing criticism that the series leans exploitative by turning real-life crimes into prestige TV. And yet, the numbers keep going up. Netflix wins again.
What Murphy and Brennan say they’re actually doing
Co-creators Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan have been saying for a while that Monster isn’t built to rubberneck at the worst details. In a Variety cover story conversation, they framed the project as digging into the emotional systems around these cases—family dynamics, social failures, the justice system—more than glorifying the violence itself. Murphy pointed back to the Dahmer season as an example, saying the core was really about father-son relationships and social justice, with Niecy Nash-Betts’ character as the emotional anchor.
"We've always felt wildly misunderstood about this show, from day one."
For The Ed Gein Story, that mission statement gets filtered through the lens of mental health in America. Charlie Hunnam plays Gein, and the season positions him as both perpetrator and a product of severe mental illness. The idea, according to Murphy, is to nudge the audience to consider the larger system—how someone like Gein emerges and what society does (or doesn’t do) before it’s too late. Whether you buy that framing is a separate debate, but that’s the creative intent they keep returning to. And clearly, those kinds of thorny, high-profile cases are the fuel for the series’ run.
The basics, in one place
- Series: Ryan Murphy’s Monster (Crime/Drama/Horror)
- Current season: Monster: The Ed Gein Story (released October 3)
- Star: Charlie Hunnam as Ed Gein
- Where to watch: Netflix (US)
- Scores right now: IMDb 7.8/10; Rotten Tomatoes 48%
- Chart status: #1 globally per FlixPatrol, ahead of Wayward, House of Guinness, and Alice in Borderlands
What’s next
Season 4 is already moving. The show will pivot to Lizzie Borden, with Ella Beatty playing Borden. Murphy has described it as a female-focused Monster season, and he’s also hinted it won’t stop at just one case. Expect the series to broaden its scope to other women historically labeled as monsters, with Aileen Wuornos and Countess Elizabeth Bathory name-checked as reference points. That’s a big swing, and very much in the show’s inside-baseball rhythm of using one headline figure as an entry point to a bigger rogues’ gallery and larger themes.
If you’re keeping score at home: controversial, yes. Successful, absolutely. Monster: The Ed Gein Story is streaming now on Netflix in the US. Curious where you land on this one: how far should true-crime storytelling go when it tries to humanize people who did monstrous things?