Claire Danes gets a lot of attention for her “cry face.” It is, indeed, a sight to behold. Engulfed by waves of sorrow, her chin vibrates, her eyes scrunch into slits, the corners of her mouth turn down as though tugged by invisible weights. But the crying is just an extreme expression of Danes’ greatest asset as an actor: her unique ability to convey abjection. This is the quality that has shaped her performances in roles as different as My So-Called Life’s angsty teen Angela Chase and the doomed female lead in Romeo + Juliet, the CIA agent wrestling with bipolar disorder throughout eight seasons of Homeland and the exhausted Manhattan supermom in Fleishman Is in Trouble. Even when they are surrounded by misfit buddies or concerned colleagues, her characters tend to feel wholly, miserably—but also, somehow, relatably—alone.
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Loneliness happens to be the defining attribute of Danes’ latest antihero, Aggie Wiggs, the Pulitzer-winning journalist at the center of the Netflix cat-and-mouse thriller The Beast in Me. Still wracked with grief years after her young son’s death in a car crash, divorced from the wife with whom she was raising him, and paralyzed by writer’s block following those dual traumas, Aggie can’t let go of pain for which she blames everyone but herself. With apologies to Rachel Fleishman, she is the best character Danes (also an executive producer) has given us since Homeland’s Carrie Mathison. And the ideally cast, impeccably paced, diabolically addictive 8-episode murder mystery that she anchors is one of the year’s most suspenseful rides.
Aggie is supposed to be writing a broad-minded book on the unlikely friendship between Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia. Instead, she has been moping around the crumbling Upstate New York money pit she used to share with her ex, Shelley (Natalie Morales), and their little boy (Leonard Gerome), longing for the family she once had and fixating on the possibly drunk young driver, Teddy (Bubba Weiler), she believes caused the accident that shattered it. This holding pattern is broken by the arrival of a new neighbor: Nile Jarvis, a notorious real estate mogul played by Matthew Rhys. Cleared of his late wife Madison’s (Leila George) murder—but presumed guilty by the court of public opinion—Nile has moved into the estate next door to Aggie with his new wife, Nina (Brittany Snow). And he’s a fan of Aggie’s work. Her last book, alarmingly titled Sick Puppy: A Letter to My Father? “Sensational,” he declares.
But Nile is unimpressed by her current project, which she describes as a balm for a politically polarized society. “No one wants hope,” he scoffs. “They want gossip and carnage. If you want another bestseller, you should write about me.” Aggie is surprised he’d be open to that. He seems to trust her, though, because he identifies with her. In her sustained rage at Teddy, Nile perceives what he calls “bloodlust.” This, understandably, disturbs Aggie. Yet this book project does sound more compelling than the dissection of a friendship between dead Supreme Court justices, not to mention more tantalizing to an editor (Deirdre O’Connell) who’s losing patience. As multiple storylines unfold—surrounding FBI agent Brian Abbott’s (David Lyons) off-the-clock pursuit of Nile; Abbott’s affair with his supervisor (Hettienne Park); and Nile and his terrifying father Martin’s (Jonathan Banks) controversial Manhattan construction project, Jarvis Yards—the question of whether Nile is really a murderer bleeds into Aggie’s own soul searching.
Creator Gabe Rotter (The X-Files) and showrunner, writer, and executive producer Howard Gordon (another Homeland alum) aren’t subtle in their references to both real events and the kinds of cultural touchstones that would surely be invoked in a prestige-TV pitch. It’s impossible to look at Nile without seeing the late Jinx subject, real estate scion, and convicted murderer Robert Durst. Even if Danes hadn’t mentioned The Journalist and the Murderer—Janet Malcolm’s classic book on a homicide trial that doubles as a moral indictment of journalism—in publicity materials for the series, its influence would have been obvious. Jarvis Yards is an alternate-universe Hudson Yards, Manhattan’s maligned elite megadevelopment; the grassroots movement that rises up to stop it is led by a young, progressive politician, Olivia Benitez (Aleyse Shannon), who closely resembles AOC fighting Amazon. Banks, best known for embodying the conflicted fixer Mike Ehrmantraut in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, repurposes his gruff demeanor to play a patriarch remarkably similar to Succession’s ruthless Logan Roy.
It’s in the execution that The Beast in Me becomes more than a collage of superior stories and characters ripped from the headlines. Though it occasionally lapses into cliché, the dialogue tends to be better than the expository ranting and faux–witty quipping we get from most TV thrillers. Little screentime is wasted, which is worthy of note in a medium that loves to stretch feature-length premises to 10-plus hours. From true crime mania to the leftist backlash against urban gentrification and corporate greed, the themes are timely, salient, and well incorporated, if also a touch pretentious (Freud’s death drive gets an extended exegesis). The Staircase and Christine director Antonio Campos (also an executive producer, along with Danes, Jodie Foster, and Conan O’Brien, among others) knows when to accelerate an action sequence to heart-pounding effect but also when to prolong a tense interaction for maximum discomfort.
The most riveting of these scenes unfold between Danes and Rhys, whose portrayal of a man who can be charming at one moment, monstrous the next, and unreadable when it matters most calls back to his protean spy character in The Americans. In a truly bonkers scene that Rhys totally sells, Nile tears into a roast chicken with his bare hands, sloppily scarfing flesh and spitting bones as his two guard dogs yield to their alpha. Where he is dynamic, Aggie is inert, just as trapped in her loneliness as she is in a house whose pipes spit up fetid water. Could they possibly be concealing identically beastly souls? The supporting cast is mostly great, too. Snow, on a roll this year after her big, fun lead performance in The Hunting Wives, makes you wonder whether Nina is really as clueless as she seems. Park puts a fresh spin on the inappropriate boss. Morales makes us sympathize with the long-suffering Shelley, even as we yearn to see her give Aggie one more chance. If someone has to get shoehorned into an underwritten master-of-the-universe role, it might as well be Banks, who makes every part his own.
By the middle of the season, I wished Rotter and Gordon would pare back the side stories to delve deeper into the psychology of the attraction and repulsion Aggie feels towards Nile. I wanted the show to give me more reason to be worried, as she is, that she really is a hateful person. But what isn’t on the page is there in Danes’ layered performance, and in Rhys’ and Snow’s and that of other key cast members, as characters bound together by self-deceit. “You’d rather invent a murder than look in the goddamn mirror,” says Shelley. She’s talking to Aggie, but In the delusional world of The Beast in Me, she could be speaking to just about anyone.