Is there anyone better at playing a brilliant, but manic, character than Claire Danes? While the later seasons of “Homeland” might’ve descended into double-crossing nonsense, for a while there, Danes carefully walked a tightrope between calculating and paranoid. She returns, alongside showrunner Howard Gordon, to this emotional register in the Netflix mini-series “The Beast in Me.” This time, instead of a CIA agent, she plays a Pulitzer-Prize-winning memoirist whose personal tragedy has essentially short-circuited her creative ability. That is, until Matthew Rhys’s real estate developer, Nile Jarvis, a nepo baby, moves in next door. As his laughably literary name suggests, Nile is something of a tabloid magnet, especially after the mysterious disappearance—and presumed suicide—of his first wife. 
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Add in Brittney Snow playing another doe-eyed wife, Nile’s second, who slowly comes to understand the venomous world she’s living in, and you have a genre exercise that doesn’t reach the trashy heights of, say, Snow’s other Netflix show “The Hunting Wives,” but also isn’t exactly as elevated as it’s being sold as. Which isn’t a bad thing, mind you. Netflix has cranked out these absurdist mysteries at a relatively stable clip. Think “Pieces of Her,” “Behind Her Eyes,” and almost everything Harlan Coben has had his name thrown on in the past five years. 
Yet, series creator Gabe Rotter and primary series director Antonio Campos initially tease a much different type of story in the first episode than the one we ultimately get in the latter seven. There, Danes’s Aggie sees a world turned against her after the death of her young son. Her second book, a biography on the friendship between Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia, isn’t exactly creatively fulfilling; her house is falling apart, her ex-wife (Natalie Morales) has moved on, and now she’s being hounded by her new neighbor Nile, who wants to pave a walking path through the woods and won’t take no for an answer.  
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Aggie is the sole neighborhood holdout on the path, which leads to an odd type of antagonistic friendship between the two, culminating in Aggie’s brilliant idea to abandon her biography to, instead, write her second book about Nile. Jarvis, on the other hand, sees a kinship with Aggie, one that she entirely brushes off. How could this condescending prick, who may or may not have killed his wife, be similar to an esteemed writer drenched in grief? 
Are Aggie and Nile more similar than she lets on? It’s a particularly fascinating question that the show only occasionally returns to, when it isn’t overly interested in having Aggie play amateur sleuth. Eventually, she links up with an obsessed, alcoholic FBI agent (David Lyons) whose career has stagnated since he set his sights solely on Jarvis, and you can probably guess where this goes from here. 
Is Aggie paranoid? Is Javis a killer? If you’ve seen these types of shows, then you probably already know the answer. A real twist would’ve been if Rhys’s petulant rich kid turned out to be the good guy. Instead, we have prolonged scenes of people breaking into houses, causing distractions, and diving into the cold case archives, all in an effort to figure out if the guy who looks, talks, and feels like a psychopath is, in fact, one. 
Would a character study about the willingness to embrace the primalness of grief have been better? Sure, but I don’t think it would’ve gotten as many clicks on that looming ‘next episode’ button that hovers after each wild cliffhanger. Instead, we have a cat-and-mouse, where the mouse cannot help but fall deeper into the mystery, if only because it offers solace from the grief she’s been pushing aside. 
Outside of Danes and Rhys, who are clearly having fun amping up the theatrics, Snow becomes the standout in the later episodes, as she’s asked to toggle between grief, sheepishness, and anger in a way that the other two aren’t. Initially, she only shows up occasionally to remind the viewer that she exists, but it slowly comes into focus why Snow is even in the show. A late-season flashback episode—one that would be infuriating in the show’s cliffhanger-structure if not for how it helps flesh out her character —showcases the lies that she tells herself to live with Jarvis. 
In some ways, that makes “The Beast in Me” an exercise in diminishing returns. The psychological character study, which seems, if not novel, at least imaginative by Netflix thriller conventions, is quickly supplanted by binge-worthy thrills. It makes the show easily digestible, but also quicker to fade. There’s a much more brutal, though perhaps less commercial, version of this story buried somewhere, one that continues the thematic juxtaposition of the first episode. But, instead, we have an infinitely watchable show, if rarely surprising. [B-]