Created by Gabe Rotter – Starring Claire Danes, Matthew Rhys, and Brittany Snow.
When I wrote about the first episode of The Beast in Me, I was pleasantly surprised. The clips I’d seen made the series look a little campier and more over-the-top than I expected to enjoy, but the premiere gave me a tense psychological mystery built around two really interesting characters.
By the end of the series, some of that initial concern did creep back in. The Beast in Me gets a little silly in places, particularly as the story expands beyond Aggie (Claire Danes) and Nile (Matthew Rhys).
There are land deals, politicians, FBI agents, family complications and enough other moving pieces that the series sometimes loses sight of what made it so interesting in the first place.
Whenever it gets back to Aggie and Nile, though, I was interested again. Danes and Rhys are terrific together, and there is an unpredictability to their relationship that gives even relatively simple conversations a sense of danger.
The series also does a good job of using what we think we know about Nile against us. It repeatedly gives us reasons to believe we’ve figured him out before introducing just enough doubt to make us reconsider. Rhys is particularly good at walking that line. Nile can be charming, funny, arrogant and threatening, sometimes within the same conversation, without making any of those versions feel completely separate from the others.
That uncertainty carries a lot of the series, and The Beast in Me has a few genuine surprises along the way. There were moments when I was impressed by how far it was willing to go, and some of the suspense works extremely well.
I just wish it had trusted that material a little more. There is a really good psychological thriller somewhere inside The Beast in Me, one that focuses more tightly on Aggie and Nile and allows Danes and Rhys to carry it. Instead, the story keeps expanding outward, and as everything escalates, some of the grounded tension of the early episodes gives way to something much broader.
It isn’t enough to ruin the series. I had fun watching it, and I wanted to know how everything would turn out. But too often it feels like a fairly conventional television thriller surrounding a much more interesting character study.
Ultimately, The Beast in Me lands somewhere in the middle for me. There’s enough suspense, a few real surprises and two excellent performances at its center. I just spent too much time waiting to get through everything else and back to the two characters who made me want to keep watching in the first place.
TV Verdict: Worth Watching
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