Howard Gordon was trying to retire when he became the showrunner of the new Netflix limited series “The Beast in Me.”
While the show — which stars Claire Danes as a reclusive author grieving the loss of her son, and Matthew Rhys as her real-estate mogul neighbor who may or may not have killed his wife — on paper seems like the perfect reunion for Gordon and his “Homeland” star Danes, it went through years of development before he got involved.
“This particular project had a lot of parents,” Gordon told TheWrap of the show, which boasts Conan O’Brien and Jodie Foster as executive producers and was created by Gabe Rotter.
The show began life as part of Danes’ production deal with 21st Century Television, but Rotter’s “terrific script” had trouble getting off the ground. Different teams were brought in to try to craft the compelling plot hook into a series-long narrative, but nobody could crack it. In one iteration, Rhys’ did he/didn’t he character was “operatic and mustache-twirly,” in another, he was voluble and clever to the point of being “unseemly.”
The clock was ticking on Danes’ deal with 21st Century and after four years of development, “The Beast in Me” was in danger of falling apart. So she called Gordon and Daniel Pearle, a playwright who wrote Danes’ 2018 film “A Kid Like Jake” and with whom Gordon was showrunning the Fox drama “Accused” at the time.
At long last, they cracked it.
“It’s the Money Monday morning quarterback thing. You really can see a lot more clearly when you’re not tangled up in the process,” he said of getting the story across the finish line, which he said involved narrowing the focus of the show and actually confronting what a “cat-and-mouse game” between these two characters looks like.
“It was just biting off too many ideas that were seemingly compatible, but they were actually choking off oxygen to really land the central theme here with the central idea of the character, which is the unfathomable and kind of paralyzing grief of loss,” he said.
That loss consumes Danes’ Aggie, a bestselling author struggling to make headway on her long-awaited follow-up book as she lives alone in her house, divorced from her wife after the death of her son. When Rhys’ abrasive, confrontational Nile Jarvis moves in next door, the two immediately begin a combative relationship before soon finding they may have more in common than Aggie thinks. That is, unless Nile did kill his wife, as the media speculates.
What transpires across the eight-episode series is a thrilling, twisty and character-rich story that evolves from one episode to the next, keeping the audience guessing all the way through. If that sounds familiar to “Homeland” fans, the comparison between Danes/Rhys here and Danes and Damian Lewis’ Nicholas Brody in the Emmy-winning first season of that Showtime show is not lost on Gordon.
But casting Niles was far different than casting Brody, Gordon said, because everyone had different ideas about who Niles is. So he asked “The Americans” co-creator Joel Fields about Rhys and discovered that yes, the rumors are true: he’s the nicest guy in showbiz.
“He has this reputation as being literally the nicest person, and he is,” Gordon said. “He was just a pleasure to work with and he took it so seriously; the chemistry between them was terrific. We got lucky.”
“The Beast in Me” is the first time Gordon has worked with a streaming service in his over four-decade career, and he said he found both pros and cons in the process. He likes the increased connective tissue between episodes. He has issues with the compensation model for writers across eight episodes that take longer to film than other shows, but he loves the global rollout. And then, of course, there’s the algorithm.
“The algorithm seems to be speaking about certain things, and this show wasn’t as prosaic as, ‘Guy wakes up with a dead woman in the bed next to him that he doesn’t remember,’ something I can very clearly put in the thriller box,” he said. “Because this required a kind of tone and a kind of engagement of the viewer, I think it was a bit of a push-and-pull with Netflix. I have to say they were really respectful, but sometimes it got pretty contentious.”
Gordon described it as a respectful back-and-forth with the streamer over creative decisions on the show, but given that Netflix has data to back up their position, he worries that more inexperienced producers might give in more easily. He recalled being given a note about a particular plot point, but offering a clear answer to the note in the show would have ruined an otherwise well-written scene.
“It’s sort of the problem of our time is that people can’t hold two seemingly incompatible truths in their brains at the same time. And it does challenge you narratively, but I think that’s where the reality is, because as we know, good and evil and human behavior doesn’t exist in some binary moral, zeros and ones. The fun stuff is in the messy middle.”
And “Beast in Me” gets messy indeed. It relishes the chemistry between Danes and Rhys, but holds tightly to its center as a story of grief and loss, framed through director Antonio Campos’ grittily realistic touch.
Much the same way that Gordon’s previous shows like “24” and “Homeland” balanced thrills with emotional character studies, “The Beast in Me” asks the viewer to consider their own humanity. What do they value? How complicit are they in their own fraught relationships? And is my spouse a secret murderer?
OK maybe not that last one.
“The Beast in Me” is now streaming on Netflix.
