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Analysis
When someone mentions adrenochrome early on in The Watcher, the new Netflix limited series starring Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannavale, you know you’re in a Ryan Murphy show.
The seven-episode series is based on Reeves Wiedeman’s engrossing 2018 New York magazine story about the Broaddus family’s purchase of a house in Westfield, New Jersey in 2014, and the ominous letters that followed from “The Watcher.” In an update last week, Wiedeman gave us the spoiler up front: The case has still not been solved, though there are new theories.
So the series tries to spin its own mystery, Ryan Murphy-style. And that’s the problem.
Written by Murphy and Ian Brennan, The Watcher follows Dean (Cannavale) and Nora (Watts) Brannock after they move their family into a sought-after home in suburban New Jersey and begin receiving threatening letters and creepy visits. (In reality, the Broaddus family never fully moved into the house.)
There are plenty of neighborly suspects: Mia Farrow’sPearl, who appears to be dressed as Wednesday from the Addams Family, and her brother Jasper (Terry Kinney). Richard Kind and Margo Martindale ramp things up as possibly Satanic neighbors, though that storyline never really goes anywhere. And then there’s Jennifer Coolidge as a real estate agent named Karen. (No notes.)
That’s a great cast of busybodies, but The Watcher also flirts with a supernatural element, something that wasn’t part of the real story. There are some creepy moments, and some head-scratching plot lines, like the relationship between Dean and Nora’s 16-year-old daughter and the 19-year-old security camera installer they hired.
Since the real Watcher was never caught, the series tries to point the finger at everyone, and that’s amusing for a little while. But ultimately no one’s motive really makes sense; the show’s ending has been divisive, and created an ironic disconnect where viewers voiced frustration about not getting closure.
Why it matters
Murphy signed a multiyear deal with Netflix in 2018, to produce original content. Since then we’ve gotten the unnecessary origin story of Nurse Ratched and the highly revised Hollywood, as well as filler like The Prom. But Murphy seems to have reassessed what viewers (or the Netflix algorithm) want.
The Watcher debuts less than a month after Murphy’s Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, which is a massive hit on Netflix and TikTok, where true crime content has become inescapable and family members of murder victims have taken streamers to task for exploiting their pain with dramatized retellings. Ron Goldman’s sister recently told Entertainment Weekly that no one on Murphy’s team reached out to her family before 2016’s The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story.
Taking tragic events and shoehorning them into the Murphyverse is exploitative, as family members of Dahmer’s actual victims (who were also not contacted) made known after the series debuted. The LGBTQ tag was also removed from the series after backlash.
And now The Watcher has apparently unseated Monster as No. 1 in Netflix’s Top 10 most popular series list, making these two Murphy titles some of the most-watched this year. But what does that really mean if people remember Murphy’s version, and not the real cases?