It shouldn’t come as a shocker that the latest installment of Ryan Murphy‘s Monster anthology has taken over the Netflix charts.
After the, well, monster performance that Dahmer put up in 2022, Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story debuted on September 18, putting up 12.3M views in its opening weekend. That’s a nice showing for the nine-episode true crime drama, though it couldn’t quite hold a candle to its predecessor.
Since the release of Dahmer, Netflix has adjusted the way that it reports viewership data. At the time, it reported Dahmer‘s performance in hours viewed, of which the series put up 196.2M in its first weekend.
Netflix now divides hours viewed by runtime to get “views,” which would’ve translated to around 21.9M views for Dahmer in a comparable amount of time.
There is a a slight qualifier to this comparison, as Dahmer launched on a Wednesday, meaning that it had one more day of availability than The Menendez Story, which certainly aided its performance in its debut week, though not enough to account for nearly double the views. On average, Dahmer put up 4.4M views per day in its debut week, while The Menendez Story managed about 3M per day.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that the series won’t pick up steam in the coming weeks, though it is an indication that perhaps audience anticipation isn’t quite as strong this time around. Netflix is set to release a documentary on the case, featuring new interviews with Erik and Lyle Menendez, on October 7, which will also likely give this show a boost.
Just as with Dahmer, the Menendez Story has drawn some criticism for its portrayal of the brothers’ lives and 1989 murder of their parents José and Mary Louise “Kitty” Menéndez.
Murphy has already responded to the criticism, saying there were “many, many perspectives” that were incorporated into the show.
Elsewhere on the Netflix charts, The Perfect Couple is still going strong at No. 2 in TV, while Uglies took the top spot for film with 26.8M views — making that the most-watched title of the week.
