The excellent first episode suggests a less gaudy and in-your-face tone, something with a splash of relative class (helped in no small part by an excellent performance from Laurie Metcalf as Gein's ultra-religious and overbearing mother) ... but this brief flirtation with taking the material seriously rapidly devolves, to the point that already by episode four Ed Gein is stalking babysitters and chasing two lost hunters through the woods with a screaming chainsaw while wearing a flesh mask, which was most certainly something he never did. Such moments become increasingly common as it becomes crystal clear that hewing close to the horrifying truth is of no real interest to the showmakers...
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The characterisation of Bernice Worden (Gein's last victim) as an aging, day-drinking, pill-popping, desperate harlot (the 'town bicycle' rumoured to have VD) is also a shocking and bizarre decision. It is decidedly morally questionable to portray a real-life victim (with their real name used, no less) in such a seemingly false and negative way (compared to what her person and character appears to be from various documentaries I've watched), and I can't help but wonder if there will be some sort of legal action taken by Worden's family in response to that portrayal.
The show also takes the strange decision to dive headfirst into nigh-on total fabrication. Gein had an intermittent friendship of sorts with Adeline Watkins, but to portray their involvement in the manner that this show does is pure nonsense (a sexual relationship, with her directly influencing his darkest interests). This choice not only drags the true story down into schlock gibberish, but it tramples all over some of the foundational psychological pillars of Ed Gein: abject loneliness and total dysfunction when it comes to relationships with women other than his mother. Indeed, in Gein's own words, he had had zero sexual experience in his life. The material in-and-of-itself would be fine in a completely fictionalised story, but to unavoidably insert such deliberate flights of fancy into a true story doesn't sit at all well.
Furthermore, are Brennan & Co seriously trying to tell us that in the small town of Plainfield nobody knew or remembered that Augusta Gein had died and been buried in the local cemetery? Here, Gein carries on publicly as if his mother is still alive - even to law enforcement officers on his doorstep. Is this a byproduct of the utterly baffling structure of the show, or just another example of Brennan choosing make believe instead of reality? It would have been dramatic enough to have shown how, for example, Gein was seen to break down sobbing in public in the wake of his mother's death: for a man to do such a thing in 1950s rural America would have been quite the uncomfortable spectacle and got all manner of tongues wagging. Indeed, the explosion of grotesque jokes relating to Ed Gein after the public unveiling of his hideous crimes is another aspect that might have had something to say about society at large, a look into how off-colour humour is a common human reaction to abject horror, to unimaginable deeds that are so foul and unfathomable to the normal human mind.
Aside from the numerous and considerable downfalls, there are some well-recreated scenes from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (particularly at the end of episode three), but much like with this show's version of the famous shower scene from Psycho, the injection of gushing gore is both factually inaccurate and suggests that the show-makers either believe something they haven't seen or are playing into reputations and false perceptions, or are just using it as an excuse to have some gruesome playtime. Circling back to the comments about the relative subtleties of the first episode, what follows increasingly becomes just what you'd expect (and, with this particular story, fear) from the over-the-top Ryan Murphy stable. For instance, the depiction of necrophilia devolves into perverse farce more than the crumbling of a diseased mind - and something that quite possibly didn't happen: Gein himself said he didn't commit such an act because the smell was too bad.
Meanwhile, the attempts to artificially link Gein's life, crimes, and tastes to the famous movies inspired by his story are clumsy to the point of contempt. His favourite wine is Chianti, really? Similarly, the link to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was the house of horrors aspect of the true story (furniture made of human remains and such) - and NOT a chainsaw. The scattered to-and-fro of the storytelling also leads to a baffling sense of time, from seeking to erase the seven year gap between Gein's death in 1984 and the release of The Silence of the Lambs in 1991, to some truly confusing trips back-and-forth to Gein's farm (you'll often find yourself asking "when is this supposed to be?").
Considering how relatively well-made previous entries in this franchise were (detailing Jeffrey Dahmer and then the Menendez Brothers), this sloppy mangling of the life and crimes of Ed Gein is astonishingly bad and just keeps getting worse with each episode, becoming more convoluted with each passing hour. Indeed, it gets so bad at times that it comes off as perverted fanfic twaddle from the pen of some blabbering pubescent edgelord. Further to that (and the rampant fictionalisation utilised throughout), there's even an episode that plays out like a poor man's fanfic version of the well-admired Netflix series Mindhunter; the big lie, of course, is that the FBI's Behaviourial Science Unit never interviewed Gein, who also had nothing at all to do with the capture of Ted Bundy.
For Charlie Hunham's part, he does a fine job despite the poor material that he has been lumbered with, even though he's not really a suitable physical match for Gein (which was similarly the case with Kane Hodder for the 2007 film Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield). If you want to see a good quality dramatisation of this story, I'd highly recommend Chuck Parello's film "Ed Gein" from 2000, starring Steve Railsback in the title role (he nails the tone, the script, and the look), even though the film is currently a little hard to find due to the confused nature of its legal ownership. However, if you can find a used copy of it on DVD, grab it up and give it a watch.
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