‘The Watcher’ Sucks the Suspense From a True-Life Horror Story: TV Review

Ryan Murphy has been dethroned. Tembi and Attica Locke’s limited series From Scratch has taken over from The Watcher as the most-viewed series on Netflix last week.

Ryan Murphy is continuing his reign over Netflix.

The Watcher, the new Netflix horror series from Ryan Murphy.The series, which stars Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannavale, gives a fictional account of a real-life couple who were terrorised by an anonymous stalker, shortly after moving into their dream home in New Jersey.While the series has proven to be a major hit in its opening weekend on Netflix, the real-life Broaddus family have made it clear that they won’t be watching.“We reached out to the Broaddus family. They declined to comment, but they do still live here in the Westfield area.

Ryan Murphy’s mega-bucks deal with Netflix is looking like a very smart investment.

The Watcher star Naomi Watts has opened up about the show’s ambiguous finale.The actor, who plays Nora in Ryan Murphy’s new Netflix series, shared her thoughts on the unravelling of her character alongside her partner Dean, played by Bobby Cannavale.Discussing the final moments, which see Dean spying on a new family in his and Nora’s New Jersey mansion after being stalked, Watts called it a “really dark” examination of the couple.The scene sees Dean then call Nora to lie and say he went to a job interview, not knowing that she was also watching the house in a car right behind him.“They feel like the house is going to solve their problems, and it ends up being the catalyst that causes a whole lot of new problems that they didn’t anticipate,” Watts told Entertainment Weekly. “Now, they’re just trying to figure out who the other [really] is.”Speculating on Dean’s motivations and his obsession with the Watcher, Watts added: “The cycle continues, and we’ve gone too far believing in this American Dream with such entitlement and the fear of no longer being relevant anymore if that dream isn’t realised.

Ryan Murphy is the producer to beat for this week’s Netflix Top 10, as his latest true crime title “The Watcher” dethroned his previous hit “Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” with 125 million hours viewed. “Dahmer” still sat at No. 2 on the English TV list, racking up another 122.8 million viewing hours in its fourth week on the chart.“The Watcher,” starring Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannavale as a couple caught in an unnerving stalker’s web, is a seven-episode limited series based on the story of the real-life couple who was harassed by the titular unnamed individual.

is an unbelievably spooky story with a Ryan Murphy spin. But for all the twists and turns and haunted house vibes added by the co-creator of the limited series starring Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannavale, there’s a real-life family, home and community affected by a mysterious person who upended the lives connected to the Westfield property. With the series captivating audiences on Netflix, here’s a look at where the original family is now and how residents of the New Jersey town have responded to Murphy’s adaptation of the still-unsolved events that started nearly a decade ago.

Ryan Murphy drew inspiration for the limited series from a chilling true story, which is based on events linked to the ‘Watcher’ house in New Jersey. In a 2018 piece published by The Cut, Derek and Maria Broaddus moved into 657 Boulevard in 2014 before they received a string of chilling letters from an anonymous stalker claiming to be a protective ‘Watcher. ’The Broadduses were so reportedly so distressed by the letters, six months after they sealed the deal on the property, they put it back on the market.

The Watcher star Naomi Watts has revealed that the show’s ending was kept secret from the cast throughout filming.The new Netflix miniseries stars the actress and Bobby Cannavale as a couple who are harassed by a stalker known as ‘The Watcher’ after moving into their dream home in New Jersey, and is based on a real story.In speaking about her role’s challenges, Watts admitted to Digital Spy that the cast was unaware of where the plot would end.“Just not knowing, often. We were also trying to piece the story together in real time as we were making it.

The Watcher season 1, episode 2 spoilers follow. The Watcher star Naomi Watts has shared how she approached the sex scene in the show's first episode. The haunting true crime series is based on the infamous case of the Watcher House in New Jersey, where the residents were plagued with threatening letters about their most intimate secrets.

mammoth launch of “Dahmer,” “The Watcher” adaptation drains all the potential relatability and genuine terror out of the source material. With a subtler hand, and a much shorter runtime, a film could have explored the rich themes of the dark side of upward mobility and the erosion of civility among neighbors while serving up subtle but real scares, toying with the idea that the titular letter-writer could be any smiling neighbor at the grocery store.The neighbors in Murphy’s “The Watcher” wouldn’t be even remotely recognizable in the real world, so we get none of that all-too-believable dread.

is a chilling limited series based on the twisted real-life events surrounding an idyllic family home in Westfield, New Jersey, and a mysterious stalker known only as “The Watcher.” Adapted by creators Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan and starring Naomi Watts, Bobby Cannavale, Jennifer Coolidge and others, the end result is a sinister and terrifying story that gives the true-crime genre a spooky and psychological twist. “It’s definitely a psychological trip,” says Cannavale, who plays one-half of the couple at the center of the story. “And it’s got a scary, haunted house vibe about it.”“It’s pretty scary.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic Mike Flanagan has, of late, distinguished himself as one of Netflix’s signature creators and as a generational figure in the horror genre; though his past series for the streamer, including “Midnight Mass” and “The Haunting of Hill House,” have been of various quality overall and from episode to episode, they’re consistently interesting. His willingness to engage ideas with his scares sets him apart, perhaps more than it should. So it is with “The Midnight Club,” which Flanagan and Leah Fong co-created based on the work of YA novelist Christopher Pike. Here, Iman Benson plays Ilonka, a college-bound high school salutatorian who receives a diagnosis of terminal cancer. Ilonka is both a star student and an idealist; she researches Brightcliffe, a facility to which her foster father can take her to be placed into hospice, and holds in reserve a secret hope that there will, there, be a miracle cure for her. What she finds, first, is a circle of ill teens who gather when the clock strikes twelve to share scary stories; it’s a mordant nihilism they share, and a sense of indulgent pleasure in the knowledge that things could be worse: They could be fighting against cosmic forces of evil.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic Once again, the great cycle of culture has come back around to vampires. This year, TV has seen a new season of FX’s “What We Do in the Shadows” as well as the debuts of AMC’s “Interview With the Vampire,” Peacock’s “Vampire Academy,” and Netflix’s “First Kill” — all of which were based on existing intellectual property. It follows, then, that the latest entry into the genre would be drawn from a story that was big during the last great vampire craze. “Let the Right One In,” a 2004 Swedish novel that became a Swedish film in 2008, just in time for “Twilight”-mania — and followed by an American adaptation called “Let Me In” in 2010 — now inspires a Showtime series executive produced by Andrew Hinderaker of “Away” and “Penny Dreadful.” In its early going, the show is intriguing: Its central story, of the tremulous, growing bond between a young vampire (Madison Taylor Baez) and her socially isolated peer (Ian Foreman) is sweetly drawn. But the show falters in illustrating the world around its characters. Though the kids are at the heart of the show, their interactions tend to lack stakes.

American Horror Story: New York City” has arrived — and FX is calling it “a season like no other.”The teaser for the 11th installment of the anthology series features a lot of chains, whips and leather, offering a titillating and terrifying glimpse into NYC’s kink scene. Zachary Quinto is coming back to “AHS” for the first time since “AHS: Asylum” as a character named Sam who appears who have a BDSM fetish.