“Don’t F**k with Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer” landed on Netflix on December 18, 2019, all three episodes at once. Mark Lewis created it. The show follows a group of amateur online sleuths who watch gruesome videos, then decide to find the person behind them.
The series runs one season, three episodes, and it never lets go of a single question: what does it mean to watch?
Trailer, via Netflix.
The Facebook Group That Started a Manhunt
The engine of “Don’t F**k with Cats” is not a detective. It is a group of amateurs. When the videos surfaced, viewers on the internet did not scroll past. They formed a collective, pulled apart the footage frame by frame, and started hunting.
Deanna Thompson, credited as Self, is the spine of the series. She is one of the amateur sleuths at the center of the search, and the show gives her room to explain how she and the others worked. John Green also appears as Self.
The group’s method was crude and relentless. They froze frames. They studied background noise. They compared objects in the room to objects in other videos. They argued with each other. None of them had badges. That is the point.
A Killer Who Watched the Watchers
What makes “Don’t F**k with Cats” more than a procedural is the presence of the man on the other end of the camera.
The synopsis is blunt about the cost: the search “pulls them into a dark underworld.” That phrase is doing real work. The sleuths set out to identify a person. What they found pulled them somewhere they had not planned to go.
Lewis structures the series around that escalation. The early stretch is internet detective work, almost giddy with the thrill of the puzzle. The later stretch is not. The tone shifts because the facts shift, and the show is smart enough to let the shift happen rather than announce it.
What the Three Episodes Actually Cover
The series is compact by design. At three episodes, “Don’t F**k with Cats” has no room to sprawl. Here is what the structure gives you:
- A group of amateur online sleuths who identify themselves and their methods
- The gruesome videos that started the search
- The risky manhunt that followed
- The moment the case stops being about animals
That last item is the show’s real subject. The rest is machinery.
Deanna Thompson and the Cost of Looking
Thompson is the reason the series works. She is not a professional, and the show never pretends otherwise. She is a person who saw something on the internet, decided it was intolerable, and spent an enormous amount of her life trying to make it stop.
The series presents her as an ordinary person who got pulled into an extraordinary search. It keeps the gap between the private individual and the public hunt visible, and it reminds the viewer that the search happened in a space where nobody has a face unless they choose to show one.
Green’s presence as Self gives the group a second voice. The show leans on the sleuths themselves to tell the story rather than on dramatized recreations.
Why the Score Is 6.7 and Not Higher
“Don’t F**k with Cats” has a published critical score of 6.7 out of 10, with a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 67 percent. That number is fair, and it lands where it should for a series that is genuinely gripping and genuinely troubled.
The craft is strong. Lewis knows how to build dread out of browser windows and cached pages. The three-episode length is disciplined. Thompson in particular gives the show an emotional center.
The problems are structural, not stylistic. The series has to show the videos to explain the hunt, and it spends a lot of its runtime negotiating with itself about how much to show. That negotiation is honest, but it is also repetitive. By the third episode, the show is circling the same ethical question it raised in the first.
There is also the matter of what the series implies without proving. The sleuths’ work is presented as consequential, but the show never fully maps the distance between what the amateurs did and what closed the case. The series wants the audience to feel the hunt mattered. It does not always show how.
The Part That Stays With You
The most unsettling thing about “Don’t F**k with Cats” is not the footage. It is the participation.
The show makes clear that the videos were posted into a crowd, and the crowd reacted. Some people were horrified. Some people were not. The sleuths were part of that crowd, and so, by watching the series, is the audience. Lewis does not let that go. The final episode keeps returning to the idea that attention is a resource, and that giving it to someone is a transaction.
That is a real argument, and the series makes it without a lecture. It is also the reason the show is hard to recommend casually. “Don’t F**k with Cats” is not easy viewing. It asks you to sit with the fact that you are watching the same material the killer wanted watched.
What the Series Gets Right and What It Leaves Out
The show’s strongest asset is its refusal to make the sleuths into heroes. They are amateurs, and the series says so. They made mistakes. They got obsessed. They did not have the tools or the authority to do what they were trying to do, and the show does not pretend the outcome was clean.
Its weakest move is the way it handles the killer’s own voice. The series gives him screen time because the story requires it, but the balance between documenting and amplifying is never quite settled. That is a hard line to walk, and “Don’t F**k with Cats” walks it unevenly.
Closing the File on Three Episodes
“Don’t F**k with Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer” is a three-episode series about how a group of ordinary people on the internet became a manhunt, and how the man they hunted used them as an audience. Mark Lewis creates the whole thing with a steady hand, and Deanna Thompson gives it a face and a conscience.
It is not a perfect series. It circles its own ethics more than it resolves them, and it leaves the line between amateur work and official work blurrier than it should. But at three episodes, it earns its runtime. The 6.7 out of 10 is the right score — a strong, uncomfortable, occasionally repetitive documentary that you will finish and then think about for a while.
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