“Monster: The Ed Gein Story” debuted as Netflix’s second most-watched TV show of the week, with its opening week viewership outpacing that of its previous “Menendez” season.
After debuting on Friday, Oct. 3, the Ian Brennan and Ryan Murphy-created series tallied up 12.2 million views in three days. Though the viewership total was down ever so slightly from the opening of “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story,” which debuted to 12.3 million views after its Sept. 19, 2024, release, its Thursday premiere gave the Menendez installment an extra day of viewership as opposed to the Ed Gein season.
The Menendez brothers-focused installment went on to reach 19.5 million views in its second week, before going back down to 13.1 million and 8.7 million views in its third and fourth weeks, respectively. Given the Ed Gein-focused installment’s current viewership, the new season is on track to match or surpass Season 2.
Since “Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” debuted on Netflix before the streamer switched to calculating viewership via views (hours viewed divided by runtime) rather than hours viewed, an exact comparison to additional seasons isn’t quite apples-to-apples (“Dahmer” had 10 episodes, while “Menendez” had nine and “Ed Gein” has just eight). That said, the Dahmer installment, which has been the only “Monster” series to make it into Netflix’s top 10 most popular list, debuted to 196.2 million hours viewed, and rose to 299.84 hours viewed in its second week. “Monster: The Ed Gein Story” debuted to 90.6 million hours viewed with two less episodes.
During the week of Sept. 29, viewership for “Monster: The Ed Gein Story” was outpaced by Mae Martin’s “Wayward,” which scored an impressive 14.1 million views in its second week on the streamer, coming in as the No. 1 English-language TV show of the week.
“House of Guinness” Season 1 was the third most-watched TV series with 6.4 million views, while “Love Is Blind” Season 9 scored 3.7 million views in fourth place and “Black Rabbit” took fifth place with 3.3 million views.
On the film side, “KPop Demon Hunters” continued its reign as the No. 1 English-language movie, this time scoring 18.1 million views, with “Ruth & Boaz” in second place with 14.1 million views.
