Claire Danes’s unbroken streak of playing women in emotional extremis just keeps growing. A bipolar spy who works better when she’s off her meds (“Homeland”). A victim of abuse confronting Victorian mores and a deadly sea monster (“The Essex Serpent”). A mother who has a drug-aided breakdown (“Fleishman Is in Trouble”) and a mother whose son is kidnapped (“Full Circle”).
Call it a niche or call it a trap, she is back there again in “The Beast in Me,” premiering Thursday on Netflix. And she almost single-handedly makes the increasingly improbable eight-episode thriller worth sitting through. Matthew Rhys is on hand as the possible sociopath next door, and Jonathan Banks does his tough-guy thing as the new neighbor’s father. But it’s Danes’s show.
She plays a writer named, no kidding, Aggie Wiggs, who has been unable to write since her son died in a car crash four years before. Consumed by hatred and guilt, Wiggs has driven away her ex-wife (Natalie Morales) and now seethes by herself in her big, spooky Long Island house, whose backed-up plumbing manifests her blocked psyche. When Nile Jarvis (Rhys), a poor little rich boy suspected of killing his first wife, moves into the much bigger house across the road, she is appalled but senses that a new book may have fallen into her lap.
Like Wiggs’s writing, “The Beast in Me” took its time coming to fruition. Gabe Rotter, who worked on various Chris Carter projects including the final season of “The X-Files,” wrote the first version of the pilot more than five years ago and is credited as the show’s creator. But “The Beast in Me” did not get moving until Howard Gordon, a developer of “Homeland” (and another “X-Files” alumnus), came aboard several years later as showrunner and reworked the story.
The result is a highly strung thriller in a New York vein — leafy suburban days, gritty construction-site nights. It wants to be psychologically complex and thematically fancy, with Jarvis as unchecked id and Wiggs as jittery superego, but isn’t quite up to the task. (To parallel the two, who carry a lot of the same emotional baggage, the show actually superimposes her face on his in a moment of crisis.)
Equally unsubtle are its social and cultural sympathies, no matter how close they might be to your own. Women are well meaning, though sometimes compromised, while men are troglodytes. A problematic character’s moral bona fides are established when she bravely hangs a painting about Dachau in her art gallery. It is certainly no accident that Jarvis is the whining scion of a rapacious New York real estate developer, and that he froths over interference from a liberal city councilwoman and proudly declares, “We are predators.”
Jarvis agrees to cooperate with Wiggs on a book about him and his missing ex-wife, a decision that is evidence both of his arrogance and of the show’s weakness for unlikely, but convenient, plot twists. The setup for this, across the first couple of episodes, is entertaining because Danes finds notes of humor and empathy in the blocked writer’s desperate rationalizations.
The human touch is harder for her to find as the plot kicks in, though, and the usual narrative withholding and backfilling sap the meaning from the characters’ choices. “The Beast in Me” is a mystery but it tips its hand early on some major points, and shifts into a mode of grinding, violent suspense; this switch fuels a feeling of indecision that hovers over the whole production. Danes manages to give a meticulous and intelligent performance throughout; Rhys, so good at playing principled men with violent depths in “The Americans” and “Perry Mason,” doesn’t find much beyond maniacal grins in the thinly conceived Jarvis.
If you have had any connection with the writer’s life, the depiction of Wiggs and her process may kindle feelings of both hilarity and, occasionally, recognition. Even when the character’s choices are risible, Danes’s choices — her micro-expressions, her postures, her irritated responses — feel right. The first few seconds we see of Wiggs as a working writer are the show’s truest, and funniest, moment.
Mike Hale is a television critic for The Times. He also writes about online video, film and media.
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