The Beast in Me
Sick Puppy
Season 1
Episode 1
Editor’s Rating
Frustrated author in need of some fresh material (Claire Danes), meet your suspicious new neighbor with a past (Matthew Rhys).
Photo: Chris Saunders/Netflix © 2024
“Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on,” goes the famous Janet Malcolm line, “knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” If you have ever studied nonfiction writing, you’re probably rolling your eyes, but let me explain to the uninitiated. Those words open Malcolm’s 1989 classic, The Journalist and the Murderer, a book about the legal fight between a journalist, Joe McGinniss, and a murderer, Jeffrey MacDonald. When McGinniss signed on to write a book about MacDonald, he vowed to depict him in a redeeming light. But the more time McGinniss spent with MacDonald, the more he became convinced of his guilt. As a journalist, he knew access was precious, so he kept quiet about his intention to say so in the book.
Now imagine that, instead of McGinniss meeting MacDonald in a professional setting, it just so happened that MacDonald moved in next door. Imagine, if you will, that McGinniss has been struggling for over two years to finish and deliver a follow-up to his best-selling memoir. Now, imagine that McGinniss is Claire Danes. That is one way to describe the overall concept of Netflix’s new crime thriller, The Beast in Me.
Danes plays Agatha “Aggie” Wiggs (goofy, I know, but she’s serious), a writer living in picturesque Oyster Bay on Long Island. She has all the trappings of a run-of-the-mill David E. Kelly–esque protagonist: big house, beautiful sweaters, a respected position in her professional field. But Aggie is falling apart. “Sick Puppy” opens on the image of her bloodied face screaming at the scene of a car crash as another woman searches for a boy named Cooper. Later, we learn that the woman is her now-ex-wife, Shelley (Natalie Morales), and Cooper was their son, who died that night. It’s been a few years, but Aggie is still struggling to cope. Her house badly needs repairs; the drains are spitting black, gross liquid. She’s getting notice after notice in the mail. Her writing is going badly. Shelley won’t respond to her messages or answer the phone.
It’s in this context that Nile Jarvis (Matthew Rhys) moves into the house next door. The first impression Aggie gets of him is that neither he nor his French security guards can control his German shepherds, who startle Aggie’s little dog, Steve. Her neighbor tells her that Nile wants to build a private jogging path in the surrounding woods for the neighborhood to enjoy. To that end, he put friendly letters attached with easement agreements in everyone’s mailboxes, and so far, no one has told him “no.” It’s unclear whether that’s because they think the jogging path is a good idea or because Nile is famous for potentially having killed his wife. When she gets home, after trashing her own letter from Nile, Aggie looks him up for a refresher on the case: His wife, Madison, simply disappeared. After a long investigation, no charges were filed and no one was arrested, but both press and public agreed it had to have been Nile.
After meeting him, it would be hard not to think so. Only ten minutes into the premiere, I felt ready to put my hand in the fire: This guy totally did it. In fact, anything he’s accused of ever, he’s probably guilty. The Jarvises left a box of wine on Aggie’s doorstep to apologize for the dogs, and the next morning, she goes to their house to return it, since she doesn’t drink. Her rehearsed hostility is disarmed by the warm friendliness of Nile’s wife, Nina (Brittany Snow), who professes to be a huge fan of Aggie’s work. It’s an awkward interaction, but not openly combative until Nile pops his head out of his office and asks Aggie to talk about the jogging path.
Nile Jarvis is a real-estate behemoth with a mean streak, and he talks like someone convinced of his superiority. He pulls Aggie’s book down from his shelf and proceeds to insult her in a hundred different ways: It’s been too long since her book came out; someone as trapped in her “mind palace” as she is ought to get out; she’d benefit greatly from the jogging path. But Aggie — who is already incensed about the dogs, the blaring alarm that goes off at night, and the presumptuousness of the easement agreement — is firm in her answer: She won’t sign. Nile offers her money, which only makes things worse. Still, she’s polite; she only loses composure when Nile provokes that she “hasn’t published anything since [her] little boy died.” Imagine saying that to someone you just met! You’d have to be a psychopath. Aggie’s blood visibly rises, but Nile keeps his unsettling cool throughout the whole interaction.
Nile caught Aggie on a bad day, too. It’s the anniversary of Cooper’s death, and Shelley hasn’t answered any of her texts about going to visit his grave together. When Aggie gets there, she sees a young man and his mom paying their respects, and a brawl immediately ensues. The camera zips around Aggie as she aims straight for the guy, meaning to shove him. We learn this is Teddy Fenig, the kid driving the other car the night of Cooper’s death, and that Aggie blames him entirely for the crash. “He killed our son, then lied,” Aggie cries out to Shelley, who arrives just in time to break up the fight. Aggie is so aggressive that the Fenigs have taken out a restraining order against her, and it’s implied that Aggie’s difficulty managing her rage was part of what destroyed her marriage. Shelley seems to be trying to move on, however incompletely: She has a new partner from whom she’s taking a break and is resuming life as a painter.
Aggie is angry, but she clearly loves Shelley. The saddest thing about her character is the way affection has been stamped out of her life by rage. When Aggie receives a call from her editor and friend, Carol (Deirdre O’Connell), she braces for a dressing down about her manuscript’s delay, but Carol only wants to make sure she’s doing all right. Aggie tells her about the cemetery, and the gross sink (which just exploded on her), and Nile Jarvis next door. She also asks Carol if there’s any possibility of getting another advance to help her keep afloat of her bills, but being two years behind on delivery, Carol thinks the publisher, Bob, is losing hope. Maybe if she can turn in just a couple of chapters, to show him she’s working? If only she could turn up some fresh material, something to really get her gears going …
The next day, as a plumber examines Aggie’s ruined pipes, Nile comes by to ask Aggie to sign his copy of Sick Puppy. From the way he diabolically looked at the book in the shot just before, I’m guessing he means to forge her signature in order to get his jogging path put in. This appeal to ego would truly only work on a writer, especially one at a difficult, insecure point in her career. Nile offers to take Aggie to lunch, since they got off on the wrong foot. She says “no,” but he insists — aggressively, arrogantly, compellingly — and she finally agrees to meet him at a restaurant called Eleanor’s. As she’s walking in, a man watches her from a car parked nearby.
Over lunch, Aggie and Nile get to know each other’s stories as other patrons of the restaurant watch them. Nile grew up in Oyster Bay; Aggie won a Pulitzer and moved there from Brooklyn. Sick Puppy was about her father, “a fraud and a con man” from whom she’s estranged. Now, she’s working on a biography of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s unlikely friendship with Antonin Scalia. Nile is not convinced that’s as good a topic as her veiled admiration for her father — or as his own story. “You want another best seller,” he taunts, “you should write about me.” It doesn’t take two seconds for Nile to recognize, in Aggie, some of his own ruthlessness — what he calls her “bloodlust.” Aggie tells him that Cooper was killed in a drunk-driving accident, and that Teddy refused the Breathalyzer at the scene of the crash, so by the time the authorities finally checked his levels, he was under the limit. She also says that he lied that she was driving erratically. All of this together indicates to the shrewd Nile that Aggie is full of rage — which is perhaps why she is not scared of him, unlike everyone else. As if to simultaneously demonstrate his ability to terrify people and prove that Aggie sort of likes it, he walks over to a woman who surreptitiously took his picture and smashes her phone with his elbow after she refuses to delete the photo. Aggie is shocked and a little thrilled. She smiles.
Outside the restaurant, they see Teddy Fenig come out of a corner market with his friends, and Aggie tells Nile how hard it is seeing him every day. Malice passes over Nile’s face as he follows Teddy with his eyes; “It’s not right,” he says. Before Aggie leaves, Nile asks her to consider taking money for the jogging path. As she drives away, she can see him in the rearview mirror, watching Teddy.
That night, Aggie takes a pill before going to bed. A thunderstorm rages on, and just as she gets comfortable, she hears a knocking on her door. Downstairs, the man who was watching her earlier is trying to get into her house through the back door. When she grabs a knife, he shows her his FBI badge and explains he’s only trying to warn her. That’s Special Agent Brian Abbott (David Lyons), and like everyone else, apparently, he’s drunk. Sporting a general hangdog demeanor and supplicant eyes, he tells her he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t tell her to be careful around Nile. “He’s not like us,” he pleads, before leaving. He would know: Abbott was the lead investigator in the Jarvis case, and he seems to have his own agenda. He doesn’t confirm when Aggie asks, but if the case is closed, as she believes, then what is he doing following Nile around?
In any case, his point is proved the next morning. Aggie wakes up to a call from Shelley telling her that Teddy Fenig disappeared the previous night. His car was found by the beach, and the authorities believe he drowned himself. That information suggests that his body hasn’t been found, which sounds a lot like another murder we just learned about. As Aggie shakes her head in horror, she remembers telling Nile that all she wanted was for Teddy to suffer like she did. In the most heavy-handed move of a premiere that has shown little regard for subtlety (complimentary), Aggie’s face merges with Nile’s as she asks him, or herself: What did you do?
• Aggie’s indignation at Teddy’s contention that she was driving erratically is giving me the impression that she was, actually, driving erratically, but can’t bear the weight of owning that truth. That, combined with her sobriety, also raises a suspicion that maybe there were two drunk drivers that night …
• I really like what Matthew Rhys is doing with this character — Nile is so weird and creepy. Every time he smiles, it seems like he’s on the verge of an evil cackle.
• I really appreciate the near-complete lack of flashbacks in this pilot, an increasing rarity in prestige-television crime shows. We open with an event from the past, but from then on, the plot drives forward — the explanations of what happened come up organically in the dialogue, and overall, the impression that we are catching up with Aggie at the present moment of her life, rather than thrown back and forth from her past to the present, is sustained. Here’s hoping it stays that way!
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