‘Dahmer’? Producer needs true-crime lesson

I got physically uncomfortable watching the first episode of Netflix’s “Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story,” and not just because of the painfully redundant title.

Beyond the grotesqueries and violence that gave me the #cringies, I couldn’t find a reason this series was made. I had no interest in tuning in when it premiered in late September, even as it remained in the No. 1 spot on the streamer for 28 days.

And now, the show’s mega-producer, Ryan Murphy, is turning it into an ongoing serial killer anthology, highlighting the life and crimes of a different real-life subject each season.

Ew.

There have been so many tellings of the Milwaukee serial killer’s heinous crimes in the 1980s, where he targeted primarily gay men of color. There have been at least four films, multiple documentaries and docuseries, countless books and two stage works based on Dahmer. He’s up there with Ted Bundy when it comes to the most-utilized-for-entertainment serial killers in American culture.

The first episode of “Dahmer” was — as is often the case with Murphy’s oeuvre — stylish, suspenseful and scary, employing the prolific writer-director’s usual queer cultural tropes (nightlife, hookups, identifying with the outsider) to great effect. As stomach-churning as the details of the crimes in the episode, it is well-crafted entertainment. I just couldn’t bear to see the pain of Dahmer’s victims, their families and the neighbors who warned police for months that something evil was going on in his apartment, turned into just more content to binge-watch. It felt like exploitation.

“Dahmer” is just the latest development in my complicated relationship with the Ryan Murphy universe. On one hand, I’ve been a fan of many of Murphy’s shows since his plastic-surgery drama “Nip/Tuck” in the early aughts. There’s a decidedly queer aesthetic and many specific LGBTQ cultural references present throughout his work that have now been introduced to the larger culture. I love the high art references on “American Horror Story” and the way he features often underutilized veteran actresses such as Jessica Lange, Frances Conroy and Patti Lupone.

His screen adaptations of two classic gay plays — “The Normal Heart” and “The Boys in the Band” — are a service to the canon. He’s also brilliantly told true-life-inspired queer stories in some of his best projects, including the ballroom drama “Pose.”

But lately, it feels like he’s turning to the darkest chapters of our history, not to raise awareness but to cheaply profit off them. This season of “American Horror Story,” subtitled “NYC,” manages to use the AIDS crisis, hate crimes and police discrimination all in service of scares. It feels just as nauseating as “Dahmer.”

Maybe my tastes are changing, or maybe (hopefully?) the culture is changing. I’m not the first person to make this argument about the show; other cultural critics and family members of the victims have questioned how their pain was used for entertainment.

Or maybe it’s just that it feels gross and inappropriate to use the bag of Ryan Murphy tricks to tell these real victims’ stories. Since the announcement that “Monster” would be getting future seasons, even more have spoken out about Murphy creating what essentially will be “a serial killer cinematic universe.”

In light of this, I’ve had to re-evaluate my own relationship with serialkiller-derived entertainment as well.

Growing up on a cultural diet of turn-of-themillennium irony, I think I was glib at times in my consumption of true crime content, and didn’t center the real people impacted by these terrible crimes when I viewed them. Even with the ongoing popularity of shows like “Dahmer,” I know I’m not the only person contemplating what Buzzfeed News writer Stephanie McNeal called the “true crime industrial complex,” and how it can both glamorize murderers and retraumatize the families of victims.

With that said, projects like “Dahmer,” and now the extended “Monster” anthology series, feel like a step backward — just more slick celebrity worship of horrible people at the expense of those who suffered.

Projects like the Netflix series feel like a step backward.