10 TV Shows You Were Ready To Hate

Audiences will always find a fascination with real-life horrors thanks to innate human morbid curiosity. However, the true crime boom of the 2010s has led to a slate of extremely high profile, high budget stories about real life serial killers and, as is the nature with any adaptation of real life events, this inevitably divides critics and consumers alike.

The latest show to brew up this particular storm is Netflix’s Dahmer, which sees horror auteur Ryan Murphy executive produce a dramatisation of real serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer’s life with Evan Peters in the title role. Far from the first screen portrayal of Dahmer, the show nevertheless drew mass publicity and criticism thanks to its perceived sensationalization and glorification of the murderer, with particular ill feeling towards the lack of consent from the families of Dahmer’s victims - all young men and boys, with the majority being from minority ethnic backgrounds - to use their stories.

Despite the negative press, which ballooned further after Netflix applied and then subsequently removed the ‘LGBTQ+’ tag from the show, Dahmer quickly became Netflix’s second most-watched English language series of all time. Critically, it has received mixed reviews, which often praise the performances and self aware nature of the show, but agree that the staging of the narrative land it in exploitative territory.

Whether or not you personally feel that production of the show was justified, the controversy surrounding it is a poignant reminder that when dealing with true stories, the lives of those depicted deserve a level of care and respect that they are not always afforded - especially in true crime.