This is the On the Media Midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week, Monster, the Ed Gein's story, is the most watch show on Netflix. It's a dramatized retelling of the life of the serial killer who inspired Psycho and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

There's something real dark about you, Eddie Kane.

What did you do?

You're the one can't look away.

The monster franchise, which includes two earlier seasons about Jeffrey Dahmer and Lyle and Eric

Menendez is one of Netflix's splashiest hits.

The Dahmer season is still the fourth most watched English language show in the history

of the platform.

People love this stuff, and the obsession only grows

each year. On Netflix last year, 15 of the top 20 documentaries were true crime docs compared to just

six in 2020. But what does it mean for the subjects of these documentaries that Americans endlessly crave stories

stories about murder and bloodshed? John J. Lennon is a contributing editor for Esquire and writes

frequently for the New York Review of Books and the New York Times. This week, he called me

from Sing Sing Correctional Facility,

where he's serving the 24th year of his 28-year-to-life sentence for murder, drug sales,

and gun possession. He recently wrote the book, The Tragedy of True Crime, Four Guilty Men,

and the Stories That Define Us. So how was it that he ended up

being the focus of a true crime documentary in 2018 called Inside Evil with Chris Cuomo?

Well, actually I had gotten a letter from the woman I knew at CNN, and she had introduced

to her colleagues, and I was telling my brother about this. He's like, come on home. He's got that show on CNN, and he's like, it's called Inside Evil. I was like, what? So when I went down to the visit, they were like, no, no, no. First season, it was just called Inside. The second season, it's called Inside Evil. We're going a different route.

We're telling stories of redemption.

So a couple weeks after that, when they came up for the filming, that's not what it was. And to be fair to Chris Cuomo, he did level with me that this is the show. I had the governor's brother in front of him. What am I just, like, walk out and give it my back? So I told him my story.

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