Charlie Hunnam as Ed Gein in 'Monster: The Ed Gein Story.' Netflix Share on Facebook Share on X Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Print the Article Post a Comment Logo text After Monster: The Ed Gein Story debuted on Netflix on Friday, it soon earned the No. 2 spot on the streamer's platform charts with 12.2 million views in its first week. The true-crime series is the third season in the Monster anthology co-created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan. Like every season, it follows a serial killer (or two). But this time, the show centers around Ed Gein, a murderer known to kill women, wear their skin and faces and dig up graves. It stars Charlie Hunnam (Sons of Anarchy) in the lead role. And while the previous two seasons, Dahmer - Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story and Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, earned a fair share of criticism for their alleged sensational portrayal of murder victims, Ed Gein is also stirring up some debate. It currently holds a 20 percent critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but its audience score more than doubles that, at 54 percent. Related Stories Movies True-Crime Horror Film 'Dorothea' Gets Halloween Release and Trailer (Exclusive) Movies Joel Edgerton, Felicity Jones Adjust to a Risky Logging Life in Netflix's 'Train Dreams' Trailer Before the show dropped on the streamer, Hunnam told The Hollywood Reporter what he hopes people focus on if they critique the show. "If people are compelled to talk about it and think about it, hopefully they'll actually be compelled to watch the show," Hunnam said. "What I would hope and feel really confident in is that it was a very sincere exploration of the human condition and why this boy did what he did." He also added: "I never felt like we were sensationalizing it. I never felt on set that we did anything gratuitous or for shock impact. It was all in order to try to tell this story as honestly as we could." As Hunnam mentions, the show portrays Ed's mental health struggles as an undiagnosed schizophrenic. "Ed at its core is a story of mental illness. It was as important for us to show the horror of his inner life and his sort of prison that his brain was trapped in to show that horror as it was about this or that kill, per se," Brennan told THR. Read on to learn what audiences are saying about Monster: The Ed Gein Story. Cosmopolitan U.K. responded to the moment in the series, where Ed looks at the camera and says that they're the ones who can't look away, writing, "Monster: The Ed Gein Story feels like a critique of our desensitization." The scene addressed Ed's influence on media and how that scene was in response to people being obsessed with true crime. Hunnam told THR what he hopes that scene represents: "Is it Ed Gein who was abused and left in isolation and suffering from undiagnosed mental illness and went and that manifested in some pretty horrendous ways? Or was the monster the legion of filmmakers that took inspiration from his life and sensationalized it to make entertainment and darken the American psyche in the process?" he said. "Is Ed Gein the monster of this show, or is Hitchcock the monster of the show? Or are we the monster of the show because we're watching it?" The New York Times also added to the true crime appeal, writing, "It makes sense that prestige television would eventually come for Gein. Viewers have a seemingly insatiable appetite for stories, true and false, centered on the more outrageous aspects of human nature - an appetite that Murphy, with his American Horror Story, American Crime Story and Monster franchises, has made a late career of whetting." The U.K.'s Times wrote: "Gein's story blurs with the audiences' appalled reactions to Psycho in a not uninteresting way as Hitch questions what he's started: 'The audience has changed and I'm the one who changed them. Like hogs who tasted blood.' Or who tasted ghoulish true crime. Another reading of all this might be that Murphy is turning things on us to play with criticisms that his work can be exploitative. We are the ones who want this stuff; he's showing us that it was ever thus and inviting us to lap it up again, slaves to our worst instincts. Or is it being that clever?" A viewer on Rotten Tomatoes wrote that the show effectively mixed emotions. "Loved this, along with some great characters Charlie Hunnam's was brilliant as Ed Gein, evoked a lot of emotions, dislike, hate, frustration and in the end pity, it was a real mix of fact and artistic license, the links to the influenced movies and other serial killers I understood it and liked how they did it, I thought it worked really well." The Guardian gave a harsher take: "The Monster series' ultimate assertion: that we live in a sick, sad world and thus should be shown the sick, sad things that happen in it. Maybe there is some value in that. Though, one wishes that Murphy and Brennan