‘Dahmer’ Is Netflix’s Biggest Show Debut Since ‘Stranger Things’ Season 4

While Dahmer has been planted at #1 on Netflix for a while now, we finally have some context on just how big a hit the serial killer drama has been for the service. Technically, the show is called “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story,” but the branding just plasters the word “Dahmer” on top of all that, so that’s how I’ll be referring to it.

As it turns out, Dahmer is Netflix’s biggest show debut since season 4 of Stranger Things, according to new self-reported Netflix data. The show has 196.2 million hours of viewership in the first part of its first week, September 21 through September 25. That’s secondary only to Netflix’s other monster, Stranger Things, where season 4 arrived with 301.3 million hours from June 27 to July 3. That show went on to rival Squid Games’ overall seasonal numbers, though it ended up just falling short.

There have been plenty of other of number one shows on Netflix since Stranger Things season 4. The Sandman, Never Have I Ever, Echoes, Cobra Kai, Resident Evil and others. But none of them have arrived with as much viewership as Dahmer has here, and the show is likely to stay as one of Netflix’s biggest success stories of the year.

Unlike other shows, Dahmer’s performance means little for a potential season 2, as the project is a miniseries, and clearly, the story is very much over by the end. But it boosts the fortunes of producer Ryan Murphy, who continues to prove his worth to Netflix, and of star Evan Peters, who will no doubt be submitted for Best Actor for a Limited Series come Emmy time, though we’ll see if he could pull off a win.

It remains sort of strange to discuss Dahmer’s success in the wake of the very real issue the show itself touches on, the idea of people making money off Dahmer’s crimes, whether that was the Dahmer family itself (his father wrote a book) or third parties (an example of someone making Dahmer comic books is brought up). While I would not argue that this series glorifies Jeffrey Dahmer at all, and does do a good job spending time focused on his victims and the police ineptitude that led to him not getting caught for so long, I do think about what it means that multibillion dollar megacorp Netflix has this as one of its most successful shows of the year. I just did a search as to whether Netflix announced any sort of donation to Dahmer’s victim’s families or anything in the wake of the series, and all I came up with was a Change.org petition asking them to do exactly that.

But it’s the public’s fascination with serial killers that makes shows like this huge hits. And obviously we have had many, many series and movies based on real-life killers before. Mindhunters, one of Netflix’s best series, is about a number of real-life killers, but didn’t received similar pushback.

We will see how long Dahmer can remain on top. With these numbers it may be quite a while until something comes along to unseat it.

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