In his opening sketch last night, Emmys host Nate Bargatze poked fun at the fact that streaming shows tend to revolve around “murderers… real-life murderers, mostly.” It’s safe to assume Claire Danes’ character in upcoming Netflix thriller The Beast In Mewould agree, though she may take issue with Bargatze’s assertion that those shows are mainly consumed by “everyone’s wife.” “We are, all of us, drawn to monsters,” she insists in the show’s new teaser. “We flirt with death to prove we’re truly alive.”
There may be a hint of projection in that statement, though. In The Beast In Me, Danes plays an acclaimed author named Aggie Wiggs who’s largely retreated from public life after the death of her young son. “But she finds an unlikely subject for a new book when the house next door is bought by Nile Jarvis (Matthew Rhys), a famed and formidable real estate mogul who was once the prime suspect in his wife’s disappearance,” the show’s synopsis reads. “At once horrified and fascinated by this man, Aggie finds herself compulsively hunting for the truth—chasing his demons while fleeing her own—in a game of cat and mouse that might turn deadly.”
The teaser doesn’t have any qualms about making Rhys’ character look guilty as hell. He violently smashes a gun at one point, and later, materializes in Aggie’s window like a monster ripped straight from a horror movie. Still, showrunner Howard Gordon (Homeland) reminds potential viewers that there’s two sides to every story. “The title of the series comes from a Johnny Cash song—but it’s not as simple as it might initially seem,” he said in a statement. “It really is about all of our complicity. Whether it’s Monica Lewinsky or Amanda Knox or Nile Jarvis or whatever, sometimes we are quick to make assumptions. But when we are forced to look at it from another angle, do we have the humility and the compassion to listen and to revise the narrative.”
