She’s still best remembered for her portrayal of Carrie Mathison in Homeland, but Claire Danes is an actor with plenty of moves up her sleeve. In this eight-part drama penned by Gabe Rotter, she plays author Aggie Wiggs, renowned for her book Sick Puppy but now crippled by writer’s block. This is in the aftermath of her break-up with wife Shelley (Natalie Morales), following the death of their young son Cooper in a road accident, leaving Aggie living in splendid isolation in a mini-mansion in leafy Oyster Bay, Long Island.
Indeed, this locale is so upscale that it has tempted real estate developer Nile Jarvis (Matthew Rhys, formerly of The Americans) to buy the stately dwelling next door. Nile is the son of thuggish tycoon Martin Jarvis (Jonathan Banks, pictured below), who’s currently embroiled in the controversial Jarvis Banks building project in Manhattan, and is accustomed to getting his own way. He has decided that he wants to build his own personal jogging trail in the neighbourhood, and has persuaded all the neighbours to agree. Except Aggie, who has taken an instant dislike to her brash and entitled new neighbour.
To be fair, this is not entirely irrational, since Nile trails a cloud of notoriety behind him. This is because he is widely suspected of having murdered his wife Madison (Leila George), who has disappeared, although nobody has been found. He is now re-married, to Nina (Brittany Snow, pictured below). But Nile institutes a charm offensive to overcome Aggie’s resistance, cheekily suggesting that a bit of jogging might be good for her, and this works so well that (we’ll fast-forward a little bit here) she ends up agreeing to write his biography. She needs to kick-start her writing career, as her fretful literary agent Deirdre keeps reminding her, and as Nile points out, “I’m pretty fucking interesting.” After all, he adds, “people want gossip and carnage.”
The show’s progress walks the tightrope of whether or not to believe in Nile’s protestations of innocence. A late-night visit from FBI agent Brian Abbott (David Lyons), who’s been doggedly investigating Jarvis, is a creepy harbinger of what might lie in store, but then it seems that Abbott may just be a weirdo with a personal axe to grind. Meanwhile, it would be easy to succumb to the popular view of Nile as a smirking monster in rich kid’s clothing, but might that just reflect a knee-jerk tendency to despise the rich on principle?
Nobody mentions the American president, but The Beast… has undoubtedly been conceived in the shadow of the Donald and his coterie of disgustingly wealthy and seemingly untouchable cohorts. As the drama shakes itself out and the body-count rises, it touches on a number of intriguing themes. We see how Aggie’s anguish over Cooper’s death has warped her perceptions and caused her to lash out emotionally in all directions, even turning on wife Shelley in her unassuageable grief, but she eventually comes to understand how her own warped perceptions can precipitate grotesque outcomes. Her eagerness to grasp opportunities to restart her faltering career finds her throwing her nearest and dearest to the wolves with barely a second thought.
We might even start to wonder to whom “the beast in me” refers, since we may all have one. As Nick Lowe’s song of the same name goes, “The beast in me is caged by frail and fragile bars / Restless by day and by night rants and rages at the stars.” You can’t be too careful.
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