The Beast in Me: Ace Casting Propels New Netflix Cat-and-Mouse Thriller
By Karen Gordon
Rating: B+
Sometimes, it really is about the casting.
Even before I knew the details, Netflix had my attention for its new eight-episode thriller The Beast in Me when I saw the name of its two leads: Claire Danes (Homeland) and Matthew Rhys (The Americans).
These are two strong actors. Even if the series wasn’t strong, they’d be worth watching. But as it turns out, the series is a great watch for a cold fall season.
And its bona fides run deeper than the two leads who, no surprise, don’t disappoint. The series was created by Gabe Rotter of The X-Files and the showrunner is Howard Gordon, whose credits include Homeland, 24, and The X-Files. And for this twisty thriller, they’ve pulled together a formidable supporting cast.
Danes stars as Aggie Wiggs, a successful writer and Pulitzer Prize–winning author whose life has turned upside down after the tragic death of her young son in a car accident in which she was driving. Her unrelenting guilt and grief have broken up her marriage, and she has retreated from public view, working on a book on the relationship between Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Atonin Scalia, but barely able to get anything onto the page.
Aggie is frustrating her patient agent Carol (Deirdre O'Connell, Eddington). And she’s struggling financially; her big beautiful empty house needs serious plumbing repairs she can’t afford. Aggie is withdrawn, anti-social, angry, and not interested in much.
But things change when a new neighbour moves into the mega-mansion next door. He’s Nile Jarvis (Rhys), a famous New York real estate mogul with a shady reputation who arrives with his new wife Nina (Brittany Snow, Pitch Perfect). Nile wants to build a running path in the woods that is part of the housing enclave that will serve the entire community. Aggie is the only person who hasn’t signed. And won’t.
There’s a big shadow hanging over Nile Jarvis. His wife, a prominent art gallery owner, disappeared and there’s a deep suspicion that he killed her. Everyone knows who he is. Despite his insistence that he didn’t kill her, the public opinion of him is mixed.
In fact, the reason he has moved into the neighbourhood is that his father, Martin Jarvis (Jonathan Banks, Breaking Bad) who owns the real estate company, wants to cool the negative publicity. Their company is trying to get approval to build a mega-project called Jarvis Yards, and the cloud hanging over Nile is a problem.
Aggie and Nile have a rough first meeting. She’s angry at his intrusions, the jogging path, his noisy dogs, an alarm system that keeps going off. Nile is, as Aggie describes him “a piece of work:” brash, blunt, rude, overly confident and arrogant.
The next day Nile tries to make amends of a kind, by inviting her to lunch in town. He is all of the things she’s already seen, but there’s a kind of relaxation between the two of them.
There Nile proposes that she dump her current book, because he deems the subject matter “boring” and write about him instead. Ultimately, Aggie agrees and convinces her agent to accept the switch.
As the series unfolds, the two get to know each other and a kind of grudging respect starts to form. Except that odd things happen. At that lunch, Aggie tells Nile about the death of her son, and how she is understandably deeply angry at local boy Teddy, who was driving the car that resulted in the accident. Shortly after confessing this to Nile, Teddy goes missing, and based on the evidence, is believed to have killed himself. But no one, including Aggie, believes that.
And then there’s the FBI special agent Brian Abbott (David Lyons) who shows up at her house in a drunken state one very rainy night wanting to warn her about Nile. Aggie is rattled by his appearance. Abbott is having an inappropriate affair with a fellow agent Erika Breton (Hettienne Park, Black Rabbit), who is concerned about his obsession with Nile. Abbott is convinced that Nile is a bad guy and won’t give up trying to find evidence to support what he believes.
Another thorn in Nile’s side is the ambitious city councillor Olivia Benitez (Aleyse Shannon) who is giving Nile and Martin Jarvis grief by opposing Jarvis Yards. She’s fomenting dissent by staging public rallies, which draw crowds and gets media coverage. The Jarvis Yards proposal needs approval from city council and Benitez is using those rallies to turn the council against them.
Through all of this Aggie wrestles with herself. As the series goes on, the story presents twists and turns as Aggie deals with her own anxieties, her growing closeness to Nile and evidence that makes her increasingly anxious about whether what she knows about Nile is true.
The series is well-written and nicely plotted, if somewhat predictable. They question of did he or didn’t he in one of the final episodes removes some of the dramatic tension, but that rich cast delivers.
Danes is one of the most intense and focused actors on TV while Rhys digs into his character’s Machiavellian instincts and takes his character to some dark places.
The Beast in Me. Starring Claire Danes, Matthew Rhys, Jonathan Banks, Deidre O’Connell, Natalie Morales, and Brittany Snow. Available now on Netflix.