‘Dahmer – Monster’ and ‘The Watcher’ Are Hits, but ‘Black Bird’ Has Soul

TV’s biggest craze these days is true-crime stories, especially TV shows about psycho killers. The series Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story was Netflix’s second-most popular English-language series ever, so popular that only the protests of victims’ families halted the brisk sale of Dahmer Halloween masks. A Morning Consult poll found that 62 percent of Americans love psycho killer shows, for interesting reasons. The psychology of the killer is what draws 89 percent of fans, while 84 percent like the suspense, and 72 percent say serial killer stories teach them about the scary world we now live in. Such paranoia no doubt made The Watcher, the true-crime story about a stalker who drove a couple (played by Naomi Watts, 54, and Bobby Cannavale) out of their dream home and almost out of their minds, a smash hit that displaced Dahmer – Monster as Netflix’s No. 1 show.

The Dahmer show certainly delivered suspense, his weird mind was interesting and, like The Watcher, his story speaks to the nation’s current apocalyptically paranoid mood. But it got mostly negative reviews from critics, and it fell short of great drama, because serial killers are empty at the core, not fully people at all. Ted Bundy called his homicidal urge “the entity,” but really he was a nonentity. Even Bundy didn’t have a clue about his own psychology and, like Dahmer, his enacted fantasies were essentially meaningless.

But Black Bird, a less well-known true-crime show on Apple TV, got a near-perfect 97 percent critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, because it has a more recognizably human dimension. Stephen King called it “brilliant and riveting. A Dennis Lehane masterpiece.” Its creator, Lehane, also gave us Mystic River, Gone Girl and Shutter Island, and cowrote The Wire and Boardwalk Empire.

Black Bird is based on the memoir In With the Devil: A Fallen Hero, a Serial Killer, and a Dangerous Bargain for Redemption, by journalist Hillel Levin and Jimmy Keene. Keene, a charismatic football player and a cop’s son, got busted for drug dealing, but the FBI offered him his freedom if he went to a terrifying maximum security prison and pretended to befriend Larry Hall, accused of killing 20 young girls.

Black Bird has a much stronger narrative drive than the Dahmer show, with far more suspense. And it’s infinitely more fascinating as a psychological drama. The killer, brilliantly and eerily played by Paul Walter Hauser, who won fame in 2019’s Richard Jewell (about the eccentric Atlanta security guard falsely accused of the 1996 Olympics bombing), is an intriguing enigma, at one moment weirdly meek and vulnerable, then confessing to lurid murders — and then saying they were just dreams. Hall was in prison for kidnapping, but getting him to confess to murder was a cat-and-mouse game.