Crushingly tedious fantasy action, a strange Keeley Hawes thriller and a snoozy Sally Rooney adaptation … it’s the televisual disappointments of the year
Oof, this $300m Netflix deal is not going well. Ryan Murphy – once renowned as the very Midas of soapy, campy television – has had a stock market crash this year on a par with the streaming giant’s own plummet. (Who’s working on the Venn diagram?) Murphy would once make hit after hit that hooked us without fail. This year, his output has gone from the outright tedious to the truly sickening. The worst offender was Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, which despite being grisly, nauseating and fetishistic about a serial killer who ate some of his victims, rode high in the Netflix charts for weeks on end. The other Murphian show that nearly made the cut here was The Watcher, which starred Jennifer Coolidge but was ultimately a duff thriller about a typewriter. Let’s hope Murphy’s next series of Feud – in which Truman Capote makes delicious rifts in New York high society – makes up for all this awfulness.
