"The Beast in Me" Is at War with Itself

"Aggie Wiggs, a famous Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, is living in a home that is far too big for her in Oyster Bay, a wealthy enclave on Long Island. The home is too big for her because the family she once had is gone. Her envy-inducing Victorian house, wrapped in floral wallpaper and outfitted with plush rugs, still has a warmth to it, but this warmth portends sickness, fever. The pipes rattle. There are ticking sounds. The sink gurgles like an infant, spitting up rusty water."

"A woman and her house-it's the stuff that gives gothic fiction its life spark. And it's what animates "The Beast in Me," a thriller starring Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys, on Netflix. The series is twitching, but it's not really alive. There is, in the end, a deadness to its clichés about writers and their subjects. It's " The Journalist and the Murderer, " rotted with overplotting and kitsch."

Aggie Wiggs is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer living alone in a too-large Victorian home in Oyster Bay. The house's floral wallpaper and plush rugs harbor unsettling noises: rattling pipes, ticking sounds, and a sink that gurgles rusty water. Aggie moves through grief and narcissism as a neurotic, scowling, half-withdrawn figure accompanied by a small dog named Steve. The series blends gothic atmosphere with overplotting and kitsch, producing stylish images but an overall deadness amid clichés about writers. Claire Danes delivers an anxious performance; the show oscillates between compelling pretension and offensively rote television tendencies.

Read at The New Yorker