What is wrong with this house? The Watcher has become Netflix hit

With 125 million hours streamed in its first week on Netflix, The Watcher is on track to becoming a modern-day classic.

The Watcher has become a viral hit

When producer Ryan Murphy, known originally for shows like Glee and American Horror Story, received a $300m deal in 2018 from Netflix, Time anointed him “King of the Streaming Boom”. But his star started to wane when The Politician, Hollywood, and The Prom were disappointing for Netflix critically, and underperformed with viewers.

His latest though, The Watcher, confirms Murphy’s standing as the most powerful man in TV, streaming a sensational 125 million hours in the first five days and scoring in the top 10 in 90 countries. (Murphy also co-produced the Stephen King adaptation of Mr. Harrigan’s Phone, which held the fourth spot in Netflix’s latest Top 10 movies chart.)

The Watcher brings together Murphy’s two abiding preoccupations as a creator – stories taken from real life like Feud, Halston, American Crime Story, Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, and straight-out horror in Ratched and American Horror Story. Though Monster was certainly grisly enough to qualify as horror, for many it was unwatchable, even though it was the most-viewed Netflix program the week of its launch, seen by over 196 million and ranked in the Top 10 of 92 countries.

Naomi Watts as Nora Brannock in The Watcher.

any though probably gave up after the first couple of episodes due to the unremitting awfulness of the story and the way Murphy told it, the true facts depicted with an unremitting realism.

There was none of the baroque storytelling that characterises Murphy’s best work, a quality the critic Emily Nussbaum calls “joyfully destabilising” and embodying that campy affinity for the theatrical. The New York Times recently called him “the King of Grand Guignol” and in the same article quotes Jon Robin Baitz, who is writing Murphy’s forthcoming FX series on Truman Capote. It’s the “‘American Berserk,’ as Philip Roth called it,” he said of Murphy’s work. “Nobody has captured that intersection between beauty, death, horror and corruption the same way.”

Dahmer for all the disapproval of critics was Murphy’s biggest hit until The Watcher knocked it out of first place.

The Watcher stars Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannavale as a New Jersey couple, the Brannocks, who are harassed by letters signed by a stalker who calls himself The Watcher after they move into their new dream house in Westfield, New Jersey. It’s a Victorian era pile at 657 Boulevard, well known in the area, but soon after they take occupancy with their two children, Ellie (Isabel Gravitt) and Carter (Luke David Blumm), the shenanigans start terrifying the family.

Bobby Cannavale as Dean Brannock in The Watcher.

The series is loosely based on Reeves Wiedeman’s 2018 New York Magazine article entitled The Watcher. The article told the story of how in 2014 Derek and Maria Broaddus bought a six-bedroom Dutch colonial home at the same address for just over a million dollars with plans to renovate for their family. But the alterations to their six-bedroom house were stalled when letters started arriving from the anonymous figure known as The Watcher. While the capacious house felt ideal for them and their three kids, they quickly realised it wasn’t as picture-perfect as it seemed as they began to receive these threatening letters.

And while Murphy’s story takes its inspiration from their story, the Broaddus family were not involved in its creation and there are many key differences between what happened to them and the series.

According to Wiedeman, the Broaddus family were never involved in the scripting of the series, nor of what became a battle over the rights to their story. “I was getting emails from producers, and people were reaching out to the Broadduses,” says Wiedeman. “There were a series of calls with big-time producers who were interested; there were different movie studios and streamers who wanted to get it.” But the original family stayed out of it, wary of involvement. “They were not on any of these calls. They didn’t really want to be – they didn’t care about the creative vision for this.”

But their house itself, located at 657 Boulevard in suburban Westfield, N.J., has attracted so many visitors since the show premiered that town police officers are stationed outside the home to monitor trespassers, and yellow caution tape now lines the edge of the property. A barricade was also placed at the front of the driveway.

Murphy wanted to do the story from the beginning as soon as he read Wiedeman’s magazine piece but the rights had already been sold. It turned out an old friend of his, Eric Newman, who also had a Netflix deal, had grabbed them but Murphy was determined to be part of the project. He rang Newman. “I got involved as a fan, just because I was very into the story and I deeply related,” he says. His relationship to the story from the start was personal.

“I instantly thought of my own family and I think that idea of how we’re living in a world now where everybody all over the world, I guess, seems under attack in some way and that idea of, ‘How do I keep my family safe?’ was something I was instantly motivated by.” He says he wrote this on a note and placed it by his computer as he co-wrote the script with long-term collaborator Ian Brennan.

The series kicks off from the notion that houses are so fundamental to the way we see ourselves. They are the perfect expression for our hopes and dreams, and – as it turns out for the Brannocks – also our insecurities. A dream house taps right into our nervous system. As Murphy says, “You get the American dream. What if somebody takes it away?”

The seven-part series quickly starts with a sense of terror, a slow surge of apprehension and the building of suspense. An inexplicable sense of disorder takes over the neat, ordered lives of the Brannock family after they move into the coveted property at 657 Boulevard. Dean has used up all possible sources of finance to achieve his prize of escaping the city. “People don’t even lock their doors,” he says, justifying the expense.

But from the start the neighbours creep Dean out. There’s Pearl (Mia Farrow) and her weird brother Jasper (Terry Kinney), who likes to occupy the family’s new house like he belongs. Then there’s the aggressive Mo (Margo Martindale) and her husband Mitch (Richard Kind), who when they are not lounging on their deck chairs opposite the new Brannock house, observing with their binoculars, like to harvest arugula on the Brannock’s side of the fence when it takes their fancy.

Then the first letter arrives seemingly threatening the Brannock children. Jasper is discovered hiding in the house’s dumbwaiter – perhaps an arcane reference to Harold Pinter’s famous play and the playwright’s deliberate effect of conveying uneasiness and confusion – and Carter’s pet ferret is found in the upstairs hallway with its skull crushed. It’s a great opening from Murphy, who directs the episode, echoing Stephen King’s great definition of horror: “It’s when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there’s nothing there …”

Then, adding another possible suspect to the burgeoning plot, Dean hires a young man named Dakota (Henry Hunter Hall), and his security company called Vanguard Security Solutions, to install surveillance cameras and alarms all over the property.

Murphy directs the first episode with great style and obviously has a lot of fun echoing both The Shining and The Amityville Horror movies. His camera is rarely still; he revels in the juxtaposition of the ugly and violent with the stylish and beautiful. Cannavale’s performance anchors the darkening plot, a man whose masculinity is increasingly threatened as he tries to save his family against unknown threats.

Unfortunately as the series develops it becomes increasingly campy and rather silly, over- dramatised and with some seriously bizarre overacting from Mia Farrow and the currently voguish Jennifer Coolidge as local real estate agent Karen. But in spite of these overly histrionic, cringe-inducing extravagances this show will still have you, well, watching until the conclusion.

The Watcher streaming on Netflix.