The Premise
Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan's 2022 Netflix limited series stars Evan Peters as Jeffrey Dahmer, jumping around a chronology that stretches from his Ohio childhood to his Milwaukee apartment years. Richard Jenkins plays his father Lionel, Penelope Ann Miller plays his mother Joyce, Molly Ringwald his stepmother, and Niecy Nash plays Glenda Cleveland, the neighbor who kept calling the cops on the smell coming through the wall. The early episodes set up two things at once: a portrait of a bland, off-putting young man drifting through a bad family, and a parallel indictment of the Milwaukee police who kept sending Black and brown witnesses away from their own front doors.
The Case For
Two performances are doing real work here. Peters commits to a low, sludgy monotone and a physical stillness that's genuinely unsettling, and he's been rightly noticed for it. Niecy Nash is better. Her Glenda is furious, exhausted, and precise, and the show is at its most alive when she's onscreen refusing to be dismissed. Marin Ireland turns up as a probation officer and levels every scene she's in. Directors Carl Franklin and Jennifer Lynch shoot the Milwaukee apartment with a clinical dread that suggests they knew what movie they wanted to be making, even when the scripts didn't.
The Case Against
Almost everything around those performances. The families of the actual victims publicly asked Murphy not to make this and were not consulted; the show then dramatizes their loved ones' last hours for you to watch on a Wednesday. The systemic-failure framing gets waved around in interviews, but the camera keeps drifting back to Peters' face, his refrigerator, his rituals. Ten episodes is at least four too many. Whole stretches sit inside the killer's apartment because the writers ran out of anything to say about the world outside it.
Who It's For, Who'll Bounce
If you inhaled Mindhunter and Zodiac and want more of the same somber procedural mood, this is not that. It's closer in DNA to Murphy's own American Horror Story: pulpy, lurid, dressed up as prestige. True-crime podcast diehards will stay. Anyone who spent 2022 arguing that we should stop turning murdered gay men and men of color into content will quit before the second episode's credits.
The Ruling
War Crime is a craft ruling, not a morals one. The show wants credit for interrogating institutional failure while spending most of its runtime lingering on the perpetrator, and the scripts can't hold both ideas at once. Its social themes arrive as speeches from side characters, then get elbowed aside so the camera can go back to the apartment. That's the Lecture Test failing in both directions: preachy about racism and homophobia when Nash is talking, ghoulish about the killings when she isn't. Peters is good. The writing uses him as a lava lamp. Ten hours, one note, and a body count the show treats as texture. Skip it.
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