Controversy be damned… or maybe celebrated, at least over at Netflix HQ, because the streaming service is still talking about how popular Dahmer— Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story is. Yes, despite the awful name, the bizarre move to flag it as an example of LGBTQ representation, and the fact that the families of Dahmer’s real-life victims didn’t necessarily get a say in having their stories endlessly dramatized and mythologized, Netflix still says Dahmer—Monster is one of its biggest original shows ever.
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A.V. Club Interview: David Bruckner
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As reported by Deadline, Netflix says the show was watched for nearly 300 million hours in its second week, which is a record that’s only beat by the two halves of Stranger Things’ fourth season—the first chunk was watched for 301 million hours in the span of a week and the second chunk was watched for 335 million hours. And if you’re wondering why we’re talking about the hours spent watching shows, which sounds like something only a robot would care about, it’s because that’s how Netflix counts this stuff and all of this information is just coming from Netflix.
Using “hours watched” as a metric also removes any question of quality or whether or not the viewers were actually interested in what they were watching, since it could’ve been 100 million people who turned the show off after a few hours because they didn’t want to stick with it. Netflix tracking viewership at all is better than when it wouldn’t share any numbers like this publicly, but it does seem to indicate that controversies—like the ones following Dahmer—Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story—either don’t impact Netflix viewership at all or actively boost it. But of course Netflix isn’t going to say “maybe don’t watch this, it has some issues,” so whatever.