The Beast in Me is one of those ‘taut psychological thrillers’ that everyone talks about in the office. This might sound disparaging – as it is, obviously – but I have to admit that, having succumbed in desperation (because, as usual, there is so little else on), I did find the show pretty addictive and unusually satisfying.
What makes it stand out is that it doesn’t go for the obvious. Yes, its heroine – played by Claire Danes – is feisty, talented and capable. But she’s also whiny, uptight and really quite unsympathetic, as perhaps screenwriter Gabe Rotter intended when he gave her the weirdly repellant name Aggie Wiggs.
Aggie, a Pulitzer Prize winner, has made enough money from washing the dirty linen of her dysfunctional upbringing in her bestselling misery memoir to buy an expensive house on Long Island. Unfortunately, she now has writer’s block, having finally recognised that her next project – about the friendship between Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her ideological opposite Antonin Scalia – might be too dull even for the book groups that so evidently relished the pretentious prose of her overwritten debut.
Also, she is still in mourning for her eight-year-old son, whom she shared with her much-nicer ex-wife Shelley (Natalie Morales). Several years on, Aggie continues to shriek like a Fury at the alleged drunk driver Teddy, whose fault it supposedly was. But when we briefly meet Teddy, who is with his mother, laying flowers at the boy’s grave on the anniversary of his death, he doesn’t look at all like the monster of Aggie’s embittered imagination.
Enter Aggie’s new neighbour, a notorious billionaire property developer called Nile Jarvis (a superbly enigmatic turn from Welsh actor Matthew Rhys). Jarvis’s first wife disappeared in mysterious circumstances and though she left a suicide note her body was never found. But is he an actual murderous psychopath or merely traduced and misunderstood?
Rotter spins it out for a full eight episodes but you never feel bored or cheated
At first, you think he must be the former. How else do you explain this behaviour: he wants to get all his neighbours to agree to his building a concrete jogging track round their woods. Aggie, to her credit, won’t be seduced by either cases of wine or blank cheques. Jarvis, recognising that he has met his match – ‘I should hang out with more dykes’ – treats her to lunch and a novel idea emerges. Why doesn’t Aggie ditch the Ginsburg/Scalia non-starter and instead write a book that’s guaranteed to sell: Jarvis’s biography?
Don’t worry. All this is from just the first hour so I haven’t spoiled anything. At this stage of the show, you think: ‘There’s probably enough here to make four satisfying episodes, at the end of which we discover whether or not he dunnit.’ But no, Rotter – whose first major work for TV this is – spins it out for a full eight episodes, and does so in such a way that you never feel bored or cheated.
Normally in this genre, it’s all about the plot. Which is why you feel so empty at the end of a Harlan Coben-style drama: you’ve been manipulated for six or so hours of utterly wasted life into watching ciphers being tortured with fiendish twists and turns that finally resolve into an ‘Oh, was that it?’ conclusion. But Rotter has pulled off something much more remarkable. Not only is his plotting ingenious, mostly plausible, and often unpredictable, but his characters are given space to breathe, even minor ones like Aggie’s New York editor Carol (Deirdre O’Connell) or Jarvis’s miserable bald minder-cum-lodger/dog-handler Rick (Tim Guinee).
If I read that Stranger Things has been wrapped up satisfyingly I may yet reconsider and go back
What keeps you enthralled above all is the riveting battle of wits between Aggie and Jarvis. It’s like watching a duel between a mongoose and a cobra, only one where you keep changing your mind as to which one is the real snake. I’m only 30 minutes away from the end now and I have a strong feeling that this one is going to deliver. Unless, of course, Rotter decides to play the most tediously annoying trick in all TV drama, and leave it all open for a second season.
Which I think is why I stopped watching Stranger Things. If there’s monstrous, world-destroying evil out there, I want it neutralised at the end of season one, not expanded into ever creepier and weirder dimensions that you need to be under 25 to comprehend. Apparently, though, season five is the last, so if I read that it has been wrapped up satisfyingly I may yet reconsider and go back.
Actually, I might go back anyway just to gawp pruriently at David Harbour, the actor who plays the chief of police. As you may or may not be aware, he is the main topic of the new tell-all album by his ex-wife Lily Allen. On a particularly catchy track called ‘Pussy Palace’, she describes dropping in to the West Village apartment she thought her husband used as a dojo for his martial arts training, only to discover bags of sex toys. ‘So am I looking at a sex addict?’ sings the broken-hearted Lily. Doesn’t seem to have done much to derail the Stranger Things promo, though.
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