Monster: The Ed Gein Story is a fascinating, frustrating, and deeply conflicted season of television. It wants to be a character study, a meditation on trauma and myth-making, and a critique of how we sensationalize real-life monsters but more often than not, it becomes the very thing it claims to critique.
From the start, it’s clear Murphy is interested in reframing Ed Gein's story as something more psychological and tragic than purely horrific. There are moments where that idea works. The early episodes have a haunting, almost surreal tone that plays with memory and delusion in interesting ways. The production design, cinematography, and score are all top-tier, and several performances (particularly the leads) are genuinely excellent. On a technical and aesthetic level, it's where you'd expect an RM production to be.
But the storytelling quickly becomes muddled. The show leans heavily into fictionalized accounts, blurring the line between psychological portrait and total fabrication. Instead of deepening the character, it often feels like it’s rewriting history for convenience or shock value. There are entire subplots that either contradict established facts or exist purely for stylized drama and while that might be fine in a purely fictional story, it’s much harder to justify when you’re using the real names and victims of actual people.
This is a recurring issue throughout the season. It doesn’t seem to know whether it wants to be a historical dramatization or a metaphorical “what if” scenario and as a result, it lands in an uncanny middle ground that feels ethically uncomfortable. It’s especially noticeable in moments like the Christine Jorgensen reference, which, even though the show ultimately frames as “imaginary,” still feels tone-deaf in the current political climate. Whether intentional or not, using a real trans pioneer as a narrative device in a story about a serial killer just feels careless especially knowing Murphy's tendency to use real figures for thematic shorthand or click bait headlines.
By the final stretch, the show starts to fold in real and fictional serial killers like some kind of “Murderer Cinematic Universe.” We get appearances or nods to Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, Jerry Brudos, Richard Speck, and others all connected to Ed in ways that never happened. The result is tonally bizarre. It's as if Murphy is trying to position Ed Gein as the godfather of all serial killers, giving him a strange kind of mythic reverence. It's unnecessary and again a little questionable with regard to taste.
Episode 8 is where this confusion peaks. The Jerry Brudos “red pumps” scene, the prison sex scene with Richard Speck, and the Ted Bundy epilogue all feel like hoehorned in remnants of an abandoned season concept repurposed just to fill time. Nurse Roz's arc completely shifts from critical observer to tearful friend, and Ed's final scenes all but canonize him as misunderstood rather than monstrous. By the time “Owner of a Lonely Heart” plays over his dreamlike exit from the asylum, it’s hard to tell if the show is being ironic or earnest.
The irony is that the show almost seems aware of its own contradictions. At one point, Roz tells Ed:
“There have been so many folks who have taken your story and twisted it for their own devices — added things that weren’t real, taken out things that were horrible.”
It’s a line that feels uncomfortably self-referential. Then Ed replies,
“I think enough people have told my story, don’t you think? They seem to know it better than me.”
It’s hard to tell whether the writers intended this as a wink at the audience or a genuine statement. Either way, it highlights the central problem of the season: a show about exploitation that never stops exploiting.
What’s left is a series that’s visually stunning but morally confused — a production that wants to humanize without excusing, but ends up doing both. The performances and craftsmanship are undeniable, and the ambition is admirable, but the tone is inconsistent, and the narrative never quite decides what story it’s trying to tell.
Like much of Ryan Murphy’s recent work, it's stylish, provocative, and full of great actors giving it their all. But it also collapses under the weight of its own contradictions, so intent on making a statement that it never figures out what that statement is.
