The cumbersomely titled new miniseries about Jeffrey Dahmer (played by Evan Peters) continues the streaming service and creator's obsession with serial killers.

Held back from critics, presumably so that co-creator Ryan Murphy could protect the viewing experience for audiences without access to Wikipedia, recent television or semi-recent history, Netflix’s Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story is an infuriating hodgepodge.

One can appreciate the performers in Dahmer — Richard Jenkins and Niecy Nash in particular; Evan Peters despite an excess of familiarity in his turn — and respect that Murphy and co-creator Ian Brennan have tangible and meaningful things to say here, while also feeling that the 10-episode series is haphazardly structured, never finds a happy medium between exploration and expectation, and probably would never have existed if adulation for The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story had been more universal.

As was the case in Assassination, Dahmer begins at the end, in 1991, as prolific serial killer, necrophiliac and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer (Peters) picks up Tracy Edwards (Shaun J. Brown) at a Milwaukee-area gay bar and brings him back to his dingy apartment, where absolutely everything is a warning sign: There’s a drill drenched in blood, a tank filled with dead fish, a festering stench, a mysterious blue shipping drum and a VCR playing The Exorcist III.

From there, we trace Jeffrey’s evolution from antisocial young boy (a superb Josh Braaten) to dissection-loving teen to serial killer, though never in chronological order, because everybody knows that chronological order is for squares and Wikipedia.

For five episodes, directed by Carl Franklin, Clement Virgo and Jennifer Lynch, Dahmer makes the same loops over and over again through Jeffrey’s behavior, which I’d call “increasingly nightmarish,” except that once you tell the story in semi-arbitrary order, you lose any of the character progression implied by “increasingly.” So it’s all just a nightmarish-but-monotonous miasma in which Jeffrey drinks cheap beer, fixates on somebody, masturbates inappropriately and then does something horrible, though at least the series keeps us in suspense as to what horrible thing he’s going to do.

This developing of tension through “Is he going to eat this victim?” or “Is he going to have sex with this victim?” makes ghouls of the audience, an indictment of gawking viewership I might find more convincing if it weren’t coming from the creative team behind umpteen seasons of American Horror Story and the network behind leering longform documentaries about every serial killer imaginable.

Smarter observations start coming up in the second half of the season, starting with the episode “Silenced.” Written by David McMillan and Janet Mock and directed with more empathy than voyeurism by Paris Barclay, “Silenced” tells the story of Tony Hughes (excellent newcomer Rodney Burnford), presented here as perhaps the only victim with whom Jeffrey had traces of a real relationship.

Tony was deaf and, in placing a Black, deaf, gay character at the center of the narrative, the series is giving voice to somebody whose voice has too frequently been excluded from gawking serial killer portraits.

That’s just pandering to the serial killer obsessives and undermining several series themes.

The first half of the season is as repetitive as it is in part because it wants to make clear the number of different points at which Dahmer could have been caught or had his appetites redirected.

This is hard to dispute as a fact in the case — plus, it’s the EXACT subtext of much of Versace — and I’d say that Dahmer makes the point pretty clearly