Netflix's new series, Dahmer, has been a massive success, riding on the seemingly endless hunger for true crime content. The show has millions of avid fans, including Rick Ross, who was inspired by Dahmer's fashion. But the series has also drawn criticism, particularly from family and friends of victims of the infamous serial killer, who say that the show is profiting off of real violence and tragedy. It caught even more flack when Netflix put the content in its LGBTQ category.
The creator of Dahmer, mega-producer Ryan Murphy, has finally responded to the onslaught of criticism. According to the creative executive, he and his team had done extensive research to try to tell (or, rather, retell) the story delicately.
At an event for Dahmer at the DGA Theater in LA on Thursday, Murphy discussed the process behind the show, saying that it took over three years to get right. According to Murphy, his team tried to talk with victims' relatives and friends in order to understand their perspective, but they didn't hear anything back.
"It’s something that we researched for a very long time," Murphy said. "Over the course of the three, three and a half years when we were really writing it, working on it, we reached out to 20—around 20—of the victims’ families and friends trying to get input, trying to talk to people. And not a single person responded to us in that process."
The result was having to tell the story like it's been told by a thousand true crime podcasts before: through secondary sources. "We relied very, very heavily on our incredible group of researchers who… I don’t even know how they found a lot of this stuff," the creator said. "But it was just like a night and day effort to us trying to uncover the truth of these people."
Most of Dahmer's victims were people of color, and Murphy defended his exploitation of their deaths by saying that his show was trying to confront the racism that allowed Dahmer to operate as long as he did. "Something that we talked a lot in the making of it is we weren’t so much interested in Jeffrey Dahmer, the person, but what made him the monster that he became," he said. "We talked a lot about that… and we talked about it all the time. It’s really about white privilege. It’s about systemic racism. It’s about homophobia."
[via]