Netflix Viewers Say They ‘Need Therapy’ After Watching Bizarre Sex Scene Five minutes Into Ed Gein Series

Reactions that gathered pace over the weekend centred on the opener’s depiction of Hunnam’s Gein masturbating while wearing women’s underwear with a belt around his neck, followed moments later by a scene in which an adult Gein appears naked as his mother reads from scripture. “I need therapy after the first 5 minutes,” one viewer wrote in a Reddit discussion highlighted by entertainment sites as the sequence circulated in short clips and descriptions. Others posting soon after release called the staging “a bizarre watch” and questioned the decision to front-load the season with sexual imagery that is then threaded through the hour in flashbacks involving Gein’s relationship to his mother.

Debate over the scene quickly split into two tracks: complaints that it was gratuitous and historically dubious, and a smaller chorus arguing that the provocation made sense in a series about repression and compulsion. “Ryan Murphy is kryptonite to true facts,” one commenter wrote in a thread discussing the first hours; another said they struggled to continue after two episodes because the pacing was “random and confusing.” A different user, however, praised the execution and said the interweaving with Psycho’s mythology worked. Those polarised reactions mirrored the pattern of previous Monster instalments, which often drew large initial audiences alongside arguments about tone.

Netflix lists Monster: The Ed Gein Story as an eight-part drama created by Ian Brennan, with Hunnam in the lead and Laurie Metcalf as Augusta Gein. The streamer’s page and companion materials credit additional principal cast including Suzanna Son and Tom Hollander, and set the release on October 3. Tudum, Netflix’s editorial site, trails the season as an origins study of a figure whose crimes and afterlife in popular culture helped shape modern horror, and publishes background explainers, cast notes and an “ending explained” feature.

Hunnam has framed his approach to the role as an attempt to balance the demands of drama with the grim facts of a case that has lingered for decades in the American imagination. He told People around the premiere that he visited Gein’s grave after filming and “hoped we had told [his] story honestly,” adding that the visit was a way to say goodbye so he did not “carry [Gein’s] presence” forward after production. In a separate interview the actor said he lost weight and altered his physicality to inhabit the part, while describing the set atmosphere as unexpectedly “joyous” despite the material.

The renewed attention to Gein’s biography has revived familiar points of clarification about what is and is not established in the record. Contemporary accounts and court proceedings documented two murders—Bernice Worden and Mary Hogan—and a pattern of grave-robbing that produced macabre trophies and household objects fashioned from human remains. Gein was found not competent for trial and committed to a psychiatric hospital, where he remained until his death in 1984. He did not confess to cannibalism and is not known to have engaged in necrophilia, points that surface repeatedly whenever dramatizations push beyond the historical core. The season’s release prompted explainer pieces laying out which scenes take licence and which hew to research.

The intensity of the opening segment drew broader participation from viewers who otherwise might not weigh in on production choices. Some posts treated the scene as darkly comic in its extremity; others described turning off the episode and returning later. One thread collected complaints about what users called sensationalism, with a heavily upvoted comment arguing that “98% of the things portrayed… never happened,” while another discussion shifted to whether the show’s sexual content distorted the case and its legacy in cinema. Supporters countered that dramatization has always been part of Monster’s formula and that the season’s preoccupation with repression, queasy ritual and a hothouse mother-son dynamic would inevitably produce sequences that risk offence.

For Netflix, the early controversy is familiar territory. The anthology’s first season about Jeffrey Dahmer drew criticism from victims’ families and raised questions about how true-crime narratives package suffering for mass audiences. The Gein season, arriving two years later, shifts the frame to a figure whose myth has long outrun his documented crimes, and whose story intersects directly with the making of Psycho and the film industry’s turn toward more human monsters in the late 1950s and 1960s. House materials and interviews emphasise this lineage, with Tudum presenting the season as both a character study and a reflection on the culture that transformed Gein’s house and case files into enduring icons.

Viewers’ fixation on the first five minutes has overshadowed, at least for the moment, other elements of the season that explore Gein’s isolation in rural Wisconsin, his mother’s religious strictures and the post-war context that shaped his obsessions. In that wider frame the sexualised introduction functions as a thesis statement for the show’s interest in power, shame and the blurred line between ritual and compulsion. But for many, the provocation has become the headline, pocketed into short clips and quotes that travel quickly on social feeds and draw in people who might not otherwise watch a period crime drama.

The show’s creators have said before that Monster is designed to unsettle as it interrogates how stories are told. Netflix’s in-house coverage presents the season as a study in why audiences “can’t look away,” borrowing a line Hunnam’s Gein delivers in the trailer, and it positions the finale as a summation of the ethical questions that the series raises episode by episode. That framing has not insulated the production from charges that the sexual content amounts to shock tactics; it has, however, given defenders a clear language for explaining why a series about the birth of modern horror would make such choices early.

Outside the platform’s own channels, mainstream outlets have supplied background for viewers who are encountering Gein anew. People and regional newspapers in Wisconsin revisited the facts of the 1957 investigation, the discovery of Worden’s body and the house that detectives later described in detail, while also noting which popular claims—cannibalism, prolific serial murder—are unsupported. That factual spine is one reason arguments about the show’s embellishments heat quickly: those who know the case well are swift to challenge scenes that diverge from the established record, while others argue that the anthology’s remit is not courtroom reconstruction but cultural archaeology.

The season’s cast has contributed to the attention in its own right. Alongside Hunnam and Metcalf, the show features Tom Hollander as Alfred Hitchcock and appearances linked to the making of Psycho, Joey Pollari as actor Anthony Perkins, and Vicky Krieps as the Nazi war criminal Ilse Koch, whose atrocities have been cited in discussions about the era’s macabre fascinations. Netflix’s listings and press materials place those figures inside a matrix that tracks Gein’s real crimes alongside the entertainment machine that converted them into an enduring canon. That cross-cutting structure, praised by some for ambition and derided by others as overreaching, is visible from the first hour—and helps explain why the opener vaults from an intimate bedroom tableau to the architecture of mid-century horror almost immediately.

As the initial weekend audience works through the episodes, the online conversation has broadened from reaction shots and shock to questions about accuracy and purpose. Threads on television and horror forums weigh whether the season mischaracterises the man at its centre or responsibly absorbs the scholarship on his life and illness. The first five minutes remain the flashpoint—the moment casual viewers cite when deciding whether to continue or switch off—but the discussions that follow often turn to where the line falls between necessary ugliness and gratuitous spectacle. In that sense, the opening has accomplished what such prologues often do in prestige television: declare a tone and dare an audience to stay.

The streaming release arrives amid fresh promotional interviews in which Hunnam and colleagues have sought to humanise their work, if not their subject. He has described the production as a committed, collaborative enterprise, and said the aim was not to fetishise cruelty but to illuminate the conditions around it. “I hoped we had told [Gein’s] story honestly,” he said of the quiet trip to the grave he took after cameras stopped rolling. For the moment, the viewers outraged or amused by the first sequence may be the louder voice, but the cast’s insistence on intent forms part of the public record against which the season will be judged.

Netflix has not commented directly on the online chatter about the opener, beyond its standard synopses and curated editorial content. The company’s listings keep the focus on the season’s scale and cast; Tudum spends its space walking viewers through the finale and offering context about the route the anthology has taken from Dahmer to the Menendez brothers to Gein. That steady cadence of official material—trailer, cast guide, explainer—sits alongside user-led threads that have fixated on the sex-and-shock calculus of the first five minutes. Whether the broader audience follows through the arc of the season or stalls at the threshold will become clearer in the service’s weekly rankings and in the half-life of the discourse now orbiting the show.

What is not in dispute is the basic geometry of the uproar: a highly anticipated season shaped by well-known showrunners and a headline star; a notorious historical figure whose crimes and mythology have intertwined for nearly 70 years; a big-platform premiere with a deliberately confrontational prologue; and an online audience primed to reward and punish provocation in equal measure. The line “I need therapy after the first 5 minutes” captured that instant of recoil in a handful of words, even as others insisted that the discomfort is the point. As the season settles into its run, the show’s lasting footprint will depend on whether viewers see beyond the shock to the story it is trying to tell, and on whether that story persuades an audience that the first five minutes belonged there at all.