Stream It Or Skip It?

After two seasons examining killers that have had extensive media coverage over the past 40 or so years, Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s Monster franchise takes a turn to the historic. There will be a season about Lizzie Borden in the near future, and the third season is about Ed Gein, who killed numerous people in Wisconsin in the 1940s and 50s; he was a huge influence on a number of horror movie directors and writers, including Alfred Hitchcock.

Opening Shot: A farmhouse on a snowy day, seen through the door of the adjacent barn.

The Gist: Ed Gein (Charlie Hunnam) milks a cow, dipping his hands into the milk bucket after its filled. He walks to another house and stands and watches a girl through her bedroom door.

Back at his house, his mother Augusta (Laurie Metcalf) is screaming for him; Ed is in her bedroom, wearing her undergarments and performing some extreme self-pleasure. When Augusta finds him, she tells him he brings her shame with his sins. She’s a very religious sort, and she yells at him that “women are sin,” and he won’t be “spilling your seed” with one, or marry one.

Ed does have a girl he likes, though: Adeline Watkins (Suzanna Son) meets him in town and shows him horrific concentration camp photos that somehow made their way to her. They’re both fascinated by the Nazis and the death camps they run. She also gives him a comic book about Ilse Koch (Vicky Krieps), “The Bitch of Buchenwald.”

His older brother Henry (Hudson Oz) comes around the barn to tell him that they both need to get out of Augusta’s clutches; Ed’s response is to crush the back of his brother’s skull with a log. But Ed imagines Henry is still alive, popping up from the pool of blood he was in to say “you got me good.” Only the next day, when Ed comes back to the barn, does he learn that’s not the case. He makes a brush fire to cover up the murder, and it seems that the medical examiner is willing to rule Henry died of smoke inhalation, despite evidence to the contrary.

In her grief, Augusta has a stroke. Ed launches into taking care of her, stripping her down to give her sponge baths. Instead of resting, though, Augusta eventually insists on being taken to collect rent from a farmer growing crops on her land, and it doesn’t end well. But Ed continues to hear his mother’s voice, and when she tells him to go get her, he brings her home in the most macabre way possible.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? This is the third season of the Monster series, produced by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, following seasons about Jeffrey Dahmer and The Menendez Brothers. Brennan created this third season about Ed Gein, the killer who inspired characters in movies like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, House of 1,000 Corpses, Psycho, The Silence Of The Lambs, and more.

Our Take: Ed Gein may be an obscure topic for Brennan and Murphy, but his murder spree in the 1940s and 50s served as the inspiration for a number of classic horror films. In fact, later episodes will feature Tom Hollander as Alfred Hitchcock and Olivia Williams as Hitchcock’s screenwriter wife, Alma Reville. So the series is as much about Gein’s influence as much as it is about his extremely dark proclivities and fantasies; it’s an interesting direction for the Monster franchise that we hope plays out as well as the first episode did.

Because Ed Gein’s murder spree took place in an era that was mostly before television, much less blanket news coverage with cameras everywhere, there isn’t a ton of media that shows how Gein looked and sounded. This makes Hunnam’s performance even creepier, because he’s not completely doing an impression and bringing his own degree of weirdness to Gein. In a scene where he’s staring at then greeting two women at a soda counter, for instance, we felt the discomfort of those two girls.

And while Adeline is in his life, the only woman that matters for Ed is his mother, Augusta. As you’d expect, Metcalf is a tour de force in the first episode; as she screams about Ed’s girlfriend “Jezebel” and talks about how she only let Ed’s father defile her twice, we got scared of her, too. It’ll be interesting to see how she controls Ed from beyond the grave; we suspect that while her decaying body will be around, he may see her as living and breathing more often than not.

We’re also curious as to how often we’ll see Ed fantasize about Ilse Koch; all the scenes we see of her are filtered through Ed’s fertile and sick imagination, with her using Jewish concentration camp prisoners serving canapes at parties by day and being chased by horses at night. Those segments don’t work as well as the ones that focus on Ed, perhaps because they’re so tonally different, or maybe we just don’t have a high tolerance for looking at genocide as a piece of entertainment these days. But we hope that Brennan and company use those asides sparingly.

Sex and Skin: Ed is berated by Augusta while he stands naked in front of her. Augusta is also naked as Ed bathes her.

Parting Shot: We see Ed admiring the body he dug up and brought back home.

Sleeper Star: We are definitely curious about how much of an influence Suzanna Son’s character, Adeline Watkins, will have on Ed.

Most Pilot-y Line: We’re still thinking about the scenes with Ilse Koch, which really felt out of place with the rest of the episode.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Monster: The Ed Gein Story does an effective job of introducing audiences to a serial killer many people may not know about, but one that has had a ton of influence on horror films from Psycho to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.