‘The Beast in Me’ Review: Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys Try Hard, but Netflix’s Cat-and-Mouse Thriller Is an Exercise in Prestige TV Monotony
If the past 30 years of TV had a face, one could argue that it belongs to Claire Danes and that it is almost certainly crying.
Claire Danes Crying Face, crumpled creases of concern atop a quivery chin, has been deployed in the service of romantic desolation, professional desperation and several permutations of grief, loneliness and general unraveling. It is without parallel — though Elisabeth Moss Angry Face is a worthy corollary — and without equal, helping shows like My So-Called Life, Homeland and Fleishman Is in Trouble ascend the medium’s pinnacle and justifying the existence of shows like The Essex Serpent and Full Circle, which, if you don’t remember them, truly did exist.
The Beast in Me
The Bottom Line
More banal criminality among the Long Island elite? Yawn.
Airdate: Thursday, November 13 (Netflix)
Cast: Claire Danes, Matthew Rhys, Brittany Snow, Natalie Morales
Creator: Gabe Rotter
The first shot of Netflix’s new eight-part drama The Beast in Me is of Claire Danes Crying Face, an acknowledgement, I guess, that the distinctive visage has fierce devotees, but also a warning: The Beast in Me features a lot of Claire Danes Crying Face, more than I can imagine would possibly be fun to play, because the human experience is full of a panoply of emotions and faces and The Beast in Me is not.
Despite a great cast, in which nobody is really doing bad work, The Beast in Me is an exercise in prestige television monotony: a thriller with no notable twists to speak of and a character study in which the insights into human nature don’t go much deeper than — I’m paraphrasing here — “Even good people have beasts inside them and that’s why we’re fixated on the stories of monsters.”
Perhaps, title aside, inside of each of us there are actually TWO beasts — one who loves dramas about rich people committing murder or covering up murder in Long Island and one who hates dramas about rich people committing murder or covering up murder in Long Island. And if I ever had the first beast in me, he has been well and truly overfed, like Mr. Creosote in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.
Danes’ Aggie Wiggs — a name more fun to say than anything in the show is to watch — is introduced in the aftermath of the car accident that killed her son, destroyed her marriage to Natalie Morales‘ Shelley and left her all alone in her very nice, very much in-need-of-repairs house in Nassau County.
Five years after the accident, Aggie is in a rut. A wildly successful profile writer whose memoir about her con man father won the Pulitzer, Aggie is struggling to write her stupid-sounding follow-up book, much to the chagrin of her agent (Deirdre O’Connell’s Carol). Her bills are past due. Her pipes are backed up with icky brown water. Everything is well-suited for Claire Danes Crying Face, or The Melancholy Danes. Any other face would be inappropriate.
Enter Matthew Rhys‘ Nile Jarvis, a New York City real estate mogul making a wealthy retreat because everybody in Manhattan thinks he killed his first wife. They think this because he has Resting I Killed My First Wife Face, which isn’t the same as Claire Danes Crying Face, though both end up over-represented in The Beast in Me.
The creepy and intense Nile, who’s a big fan of Aggie’s book, wants to set up a jogging path through the forest behind or near or around his house (geography in this show is nonsense, but so is using “a jogging path” as a key plot point). It requires neighborhood approval. Aggie doesn’t want to give her approval because she thinks Nile killed his first wife, though his new wife (Brittany Snow‘s Nina) seems friendly.
Trying to win Aggie’s signature, Nile takes her to lunch, where he’s creepy and intense, but she’s intrigued, because even good people have beasts inside of them and that’s why we’re fixated on monsters. Since she’s a wildly successful profile writer, she proposes writing a book about him, because her current book project sounds really stupid.
So yes, the plot of The Beast in Me is basically, “What if Robert Durst moved in next to Taffy Brodesser-Akner and she decided to write a book about him?” directed, in four of eight episodes, by Antonio Campos with a similar vibe — I’d call it “whimsical paranoia” — to what he brought to the first season of The Sinner.
Soon, Aggie’s interviewing Nile while also investigating or reinvestigating the murder he either did or didn’t commit, which worries Nile’s wealthy father Martin (Jonathan Banks) because the family has a major land deal awaiting final city approval — a deal he views as a better legacy than “wealthy father of a guy who maybe killed his wife.”
Meanwhile or simultaneously or whatever, there’s an FBI investigation involving Agent Abbott, played by David Lyons, and Agent Breton, played by Hettienne Park, whose recent niche as Netflix’s go-to New York City law enforcement official investigating a crime the show barely cares about — see also Black Rabbit — is far less than she deserves.
The most interesting thing about The Beast in Me (which I somehow haven’t mentioned was created by Gabe Rotter and counts Howard Gordon among its producers) is that I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a show in which every conversation takes place between two characters who each think the other is an idiot. Why is that interesting? Dunno, but I found it amusing. Everybody in the show thinks they’re the smartest person in the room, and that in the game of cat-and-mouse they’re playing, they’re the cat. I think it’s a viable approach to a certain kind of psychology, but requires that the actual smartest people in the room be the writers, capable of constantly zigging-and-zagging so that we’re on edge like the characters.
The second most interesting thing about The Beast in Me is the dynamic between Banks’ Martin, Rhys’ Nile and the bald, menacing character played by Tim Guinee. In this trio and their interactions is an entirely different story about wealth, masculinity and legacy, which really isn’t what the show is about.
The third most interesting thing about The Beast in Me is the last shot, which made me laugh very hard in a way that it absolutely was not supposed to.
The least interesting thing about The Beast in Me is nearly everything that actually happens in The Beast in Me. Here is a series that fails to deliver anything even slightly surprising for nearly six full episodes, arrives at what appears to be an intriguing reversal of course, drains the momentum entirely with the flashback-driven penultimate episode, and then returns to the main story in a way that instantly defuses everything that could have been potent about the earlier cliffhanger. I kept waiting for the show to do something to upend its premise, but it really doesn’t. I’ve never seen a show that settled into “what you see is what you get” this swiftly.
All this means is that the performances start in one place, end in the same place and barely migrate for eight hours. In Danes’ case, the note she’s asked to play is one she does well, but stretched across this duration it’s hard to be excited by it. In Rhys’ case, it’s a creepy intensity that’s slightly against type — not that Philip Jennings wasn’t sometimes creepily intense — but eight episodes is a lot of “sneer malevolently, sneer malevolently, be disarmingly earnest for five seconds, sneer malevolently” on repeat.
I liked Snow, continuing a thoroughly earned 2025 career renaissance. I like when Morales plays roles that let her be sincere, but mostly because of how much more they make me appreciate when she returns to parts that let her go full-snark. Banks became my avatar through the second half of the show, walking around impatient and bored with everything as only Jonathan Banks can.
Generally, it’s fatigue with the story’s lack of forward momentum that did me in. If The Beast in Me had been a 100-minute thriller in 1993 with Julia Roberts as the grieving profile writer and Michael Douglas as the possibly homicidal mogul, it probably could have worked. As the latest eight-episode showcase for Claire Danes Crying Face and the latest incarnation of The Real Rich Sociopaths of Long Island, the beast in me is ready for a nap.
