Aggie Wiggs, a famous Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, is living in a home that is far too big for her in Oyster Bay, a wealthy enclave on Long Island. The home is too big for her because the family she once had is gone. Her envy-inducing Victorian house, wrapped in floral wallpaper and outfitted with plush rugs, still has a warmth to it, but this warmth portends sickness, fever. The pipes rattle. There are ticking sounds. The sink gurgles like an infant, spitting up rusty water.
A woman and her house—it’s the stuff that gives gothic fiction its life spark. And it’s what animates “The Beast in Me,” a thriller starring Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys, on Netflix. The series is twitching, but it’s not really alive. There is, in the end, a deadness to its clichés about writers and their subjects. It’s “The Journalist and the Murderer,” rotted with overplotting and kitsch. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t love the show, or its pretensions to real storytelling, given how offensively rote some television has become.
Danes plays Aggie, who is miserable as an act of defiance. Her permanent expression is a scowl; her gait, as she walks around her private community with her dog, a discordantly cute white ball of fluff named Steve, is a hunched march. Aggie is only half living in the world—she’s mostly dodging it. This is the condition of writers. This is the condition of grief. Of the many incarnations of the narcissist, there is the braggart, and there is also the neurotic. Aggie, who we occasionally see muttering at her desk, is the latter. The first shot of “The Beast in Me” reveals her character covered in blood, doing an Edvard Munch scream. (Danes is the premier television actor of anxiety.) Most of us forget that “The Scream,” which we can more or less conjure in our minds, is a painting about subjectivity. Often neglected are the two whorled figures, strolling placidly in the background. They are unaware or, worse, unbothered by the agony of the foregrounded. Aggie is living in that kind of pained isolation until she meets Nile Jarvis (Rhys), the scion of a real-estate dynasty, who sees in Aggie a kindred spirit.
What is the opposite of a meet-cute? One afternoon, enormous guard dogs ambush Aggie’s door. (The dog motif runs through “The Beast in Me.”) They are the sentinels of Nile, who has moved to the neighborhood from Manhattan. Nile is skeletal like Jared Kushner; his thinness is foreboding, marking a disavowal of all that is sensual. When we first encounter him, he is drinking beet juice, which we immediately interpret as a symbol for blood. A scandal has driven him out of the city: everyone thinks he killed his ex-wife, Madison, who went missing one day. His new wife, Nina (Brittany Snow), an art dealer who is also Madison’s former assistant, gleams with insecurity.
Nile is keen to build a jogging path in the woods of his new community. Everyone besides Aggie has acquiesced. Through various intrusions—like the dogs and, later, an unwelcome crate of wine—he coaxes her to visit his estate. He wants that path. He also wants to conquer Aggie. It’s not really about sex. (Aggie is gay, for one, and although Nile is a brute, he’s not a brute in that way.) Rather, it’s about the despoiling of an intellectual. “The Beast in Me” is living in an antiquated version of New York, one in which writers still hold sway. The rustic chic of Aggie’s world gives way to the greige and overexposure of Nile’s universe. In many scenes, Nile is overblasted with light so that the crevices of his eyes appear like sinks. He is visually tabloid. In his office one day, he pulls out a copy of Aggie’s hit book “Sick Puppy,” which is about her father, who is shaded vaguely as a malevolent force, and Nile delivers his sharp assessment. Aggie, he diagnoses, is self-isolating, and her struggle with her current writing project—a book about the “unlikely friendship” between Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia—indicates that she has not dealt with the death of her eight-year-old son, Cooper, who died in a car crash. Hence the first shot of Aggie, bloodied and screaming. Aggie is appalled at Nile’s presumptuousness, his entitlement. But she is also intrigued.
Like its characters, “The Beast in Me” is pedigreed. Danes and Rhys carry the legacy of great paranoia television between them—with “Homeland” and “The Americans,” respectively. Howard Gordon, the producer who shepherded not only “Homeland” but also “The X-Files” to screen, lifted the initial script by Gabe Rotter out of development limbo. Jodie Foster and Conan O’Brien are among the producers. Antonio Campos, the creator of “The Staircase,” directed a good chunk of the series’ eight episodes. In television about New York City power, you must often suffer through featurelessness. (See “Black Rabbit,” also on Netflix.) “The Beast in Me” drills down on the specifics. There are on-the-money allusions to the Gagosian, and to the colluding marriage of the art and real-estate worlds. (Madison, too, was a gallerist.) Aggie has a framed copy of her Profile in The New Yorker. Jarvis Industries is building a development that is straight-up called Jarvis Yards.