The Beast In Me

Rooting “The Beast in Me” in Aggie’s perspective means that, while the series is absorbingly paced and makes full use of the lead actors’ talents, it’s also lopsided as a character study.

Some viewers who start this will find themselves sufficiently invested to see it through to the end. But there will certainly be others – like me – who think The Beast In Me should have been put out of its misery long before it made it to Netflix.

An expertly performed and assuredly directed saga about storytelling, self-delusion, and murder that never stops playing familiar narrative games and indulging in overwrought exposition.

The muddied narrative does its job in pitting Danes and Rhys together in scene after scene, but it also keeps the show from being as vicious as it should be, leaving them to make up the difference.

“The Beast in Me” is a mystery but it tips its hand early on some major points, and shifts into a mode of grinding, violent suspense; this switch fuels a feeling of indecision that hovers over the whole production. Danes manages to give a meticulous and intelligent performance throughout; Rhys, so good at playing principled men with violent depths in “The Americans” and “Perry Mason,” doesn’t find much beyond maniacal grins in the thinly conceived Jarvis.

It just doesn't go quite right enough to live up to the talent and credentials of its two leads. And no matter how strong your actors are, it doesn't make up for weak scripts surrounding them.

Here is a series that fails to deliver anything even slightly surprising for nearly six full episodes, arrives at what appears to be an intriguing reversal of course, drains the momentum entirely with the flashback-driven penultimate episode, and then returns to the main story in a way that instantly defuses everything that could have been potent about the earlier cliffhanger.

It's the kind of daft assembly line thriller that you'd normally expect to see fired out of Netflix's Harlan Coben machine, or perhaps aired across three consecutive nights on 5; but the money and star-power behind this one does give it a certain charm.