The “beast inside me” is at war with itself

Aggie Wiggs, the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize-winning author, lives in a house too big for her in Oyster Bay, an affluent enclave on Long Island. The house is too big for her because the family she had before is gone. Her enviable Victorian house, covered in floral wallpaper and outfitted with plush carpets, still has warmth, but that warmth portends illness and fever. The pipes are vibrating. There are ticking sounds. The sink gurgles like a baby, spitting out rusty water.

The woman and her home – these are the things that give gothic fiction its spark of life. That’s what drives The Beast in Me, a thriller starring Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys, on Netflix. The series shivers, but it’s not really alive. Ultimately, there is death in clichés about writers and their subjects. It’s a movie called “The Journalist and the Killer” that rots due to over-planning and farce. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t like this show, or its claims to tell true stories, given how crass some TV shows have become.

Danes plays the hapless Aggie as an act of defiance. Her permanent expression is a frown. Her walk, as she wanders through her own community with her dog, an incongruously cute white ball of fluff named Steph, is a curtsey. Aggie only lives half her life in the world, and she mostly evades it. This is the case with writers. This is the state of grief. Among the many incarnations of the narcissist, there is the braggart, and there is also the neurotic. Aggie, who we sometimes see muttering at her desk, is the last. The first shot of “The Beast in Me” reveals her character covered in blood, doing an Edward Munch scream. (The Danes are the number one TV actor to raise concern.) Most of us forget that the movie “The Scream,” which we can conjure in our minds in one way or another, is a painting that talks about subjectivity. The two coiled figures are often overlooked, wandering quietly in the background. They are unaware, or worse, unbothered by the suffering of the people at the front. Aggie lives in this kind of painful isolation until she meets Niall Jarvis (Rhys), the scion of a real estate dynasty, who sees in Aggie a kindred spirit.

What is the opposite of meet pleasant? One afternoon, huge guard dogs ambushed Aggie’s door. (The dog figure passes through “The Beast Within Me”). They are the guardians of the Nile River, who moved to the neighborhood from Manhattan. Nile is a skeleton like Jared Kushner. His thinness warns of danger, indicating a disavowal of everything sensual. When we first meet him, he is drinking beet juice, which we immediately interpret as a symbol of blood. A scandal has driven him out of town: everyone believes he killed his ex-wife Madison, who one day disappeared. His new wife, Nina (Brittany Snow), an art dealer and also Madison’s former assistant, feels insecure.

Niall is keen to build a jogging track in the woods of his new community. Everyone except Aggie agreed. Through various interventions—such as dogs and, later, an unwelcome wine box—he convinces her to visit his estate. He wants this way. He also wants to beat Aggie. It’s not really about sex. (Aggie is gay, for example, and although Niall is brutal, he’s not brutal in that way.) Rather, it’s about the dispossession of an intellectual. The Monster Within lives in an antiquated version of New York, a version still controlled by writers. The rustic elegance of Aggie’s world gives way to the gray and overexposure of the Nile universe. In many scenes, Nile is flooded with light so that the slits of his eyes look like sinks. It’s visually tabloid. In his office one day, he pulls out a copy of Aggie’s hit book “Sick Puppy,” about her father, who is mysteriously shadowed as a malevolent force, and Niall offers his sharp assessment. Aggie is diagnosed with self-isolation, and her struggle with her current writing project — a book about the “unlikely friendship” between Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia — suggests she has not come to terms with the death of her eight-year-old son, Cooper, who died in a car accident. Hence the first shot of Aji, covered in blood and screaming. Agee is appalled by Nile’s arrogance and entitlement. But she’s also fascinated.

Like its characters, “The Beast Within” has a lineage. Danes and Rees carry a great legacy of TV paranoia between them — with “Homeland” and “The Americans,” respectively. Howard Gordon, the producer who shepherded not only Homeland but also The X-Files to the screen, brought the initial screenplay by Gabe Rutter out of development limbo. Jodie Foster and Conan O’Brien are among the producers. Antonio Campos, creator of “The Staircase,” directed much of the series’ eight episodes. In TV shows about the power of New York City, it often suffers from a lack of features. (Also see “Black Rabbit” on Netflix.) “The Beast in Me” delves into the details. There are allusions to money to the Gagosians, and to the complicit marriage between the worlds of art and real estate. (Madison was also a gallery owner.) Agee has a framed copy of her profile at the The New Yorker. Jarvis Industries is building a live-action development called Jarvis Yards.