I don’t think there’s a way to make a show about Jeffrey Dahmer’s murders without Jeffrey Dahmer being the star in one way or another. You could tell a story about one of the people he killed, and what their death meant to others, but to group those stories together necessarily foregrounds the one thing that connects them.
I don’t condemn people for being interested in serial killers though. Part of being interested in humanity is curiosity about its outer extremes. Even if it takes the form of lurid entertainment, that maybe has a flawed but useful social function.
It’s a completely different thing, but this makes me think about a good article in Jacobin (by Tashan Reed, fall 2021) about the Black Panther Afeni Shakur. It is more illuminating about both people by not mentioning until near the end that she later became Tupac’s mom. It could probably have got a wider audience as a TMZ post about Tupac, but then the whole story about Afeni and the Panthers would just read as filler to skim over. I guess the point is that it takes a certain amount of effort from the audience to hear stories that aren’t focused around celebrity.
