Claire Danes’s unbroken streak of playing women in emotional extremis just keeps growing. A bipolar spy who works better when she’s off her meds in “Homeland”. A victim of abuse confronting Victorian mores and a deadly sea monster (“The Essex Serpent”). A mother who has a drug-aided breakdown (“Fleishman Is in Trouble”) and a mother whose son is kidnapped (“Full Circle”).

Call it a niche or call it a trap, she is back there again in “The Beast in Me,” premiering Thursday on Netflix. And she almost single-handedly makes the increasingly improbable eight-episode thriller worth sitting through. Matthew Rhys is on hand as the possible sociopath next door, and Jonathan Banks does his tough-guy thing as the new neighbor’s father. But it’s Danes’s show.

She plays a writer named, no kidding, Aggie Wiggs, who has been unable to write since her son died in a car crash four years before. Consumed by hatred and guilt, Wiggs has driven away her ex-wife (Natalie Morales) and now seethes by herself in her big, spooky Long Island house, whose backed-up plumbing manifests her blocked psyche. When Nile Jarvis (Rhys), a poor little rich boy suspected of killing his first wife, moves into the much bigger house across the road, she is appalled but senses that a new book may have fallen into her lap.

A Twisted Tale of Grief and Obsession

Like Wiggs’s writing, “The Beast in Me” took its time coming to fruition. Gabe Rotter, who worked on various Chris Carter projects including the final season of “The X-Files,” wrote the first version of the pilot more than five years ago and is credited as the show’s creator. But “The Beast in Me” did not get moving until Howard Gordon, a developer of “Homeland” (and another “X-Files” alumnus), came aboard several years later as showrunner and reworked the story.

The result is a highly strung thriller in a New York vein — leafy suburban days, gritty construction-site nights. It wants to be psychologically complex and thematically fancy, with Jarvis as unchecked id and Wiggs as jittery superego, but isn’t quite up to the task. To parallel the two, who carry a lot of the same emotional baggage, the show actually superimposes her face on his in a moment of crisis.

For an accused murderer, Nile Jarvis has a curious way of bringing people back to life — just ask his neighbor, Aggie Wiggs. Flattened by grief after the loss of her son, acclaimed author Aggie takes on writing Nile’s biography almost as a challenge. She soon gets more than she bargained for. “For whatever reason, this project gives her some kind of reason to be and think again,” Danes tells Tudum. “He’s this unlikely catalyst and muse, and she’s just so relieved to finally have access to her creative self again that she kind of can’t help it.”

Stellar Performances Drive the Thriller

Of course, having Nile in her life isn’t a simple proposition — Aggie is soon sucked into the real estate tycoon’s corrupt world. As she attempts to get to the bottom of whether Nile killed his first wife, Madison, bodies start to mount. Aggie is forced to confront not just the inner evil of her enigmatic neighbor, but also her own darker urges. “The line between us all is relatively thin,” Rhys tells Tudum. “This could be you; you lose your son, you could be driven to doing this. Any number of external factors that you have no control over could lead you to these things.”

Claire Danes plays Aggie Wiggs, a writer who made her name with a book about her troubled relationship with her father. She is currently stuck on her next book, about the friendship between supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her fellow judge but polar political opposite Antonin Scalia, not least because she is grieving the eight-year-old son she and her now ex-wife Shelley lost to a drunk driver four years earlier.

Into her affluent neighbourhood comes multimillionaire scion of a real estate developer, Nile Jarvis. “I should hang out with more dykes,” he says admiringly to Aggie when she refuses to let him cut a jogging trail through communally owned woods. He is a deeply unlovely piece of work and exactly what she needs. Thus are they brought together, forming the fundamentally antagonistic and compelling connection that fuels the rest of the show.

Complex Character Relationships

For showrunner, writer, and executive producer Howard Gordon, Aggie’s bereavement forms the show’s emotional center. “Life is loss, and loss as a theme is something that is catnip, I think, to a writer,” he tells Tudum. “One of the subversive pleasures of being a writer is you get to work through these fears and horrors on the page or on the screen.”

Aggie has a lot of reasons to pivot from her Supreme Court book to a biography of Nile Jarvis. It will make her literary agent happy; it will give her an opportunity to investigate the disappearance of Teddy; and, even if she can’t quite admit it herself, it will allow her to spend more time exploring her twisted relationship with Nile. “There’s this ruse, the cover, the excuse of seeing if he was truly responsible,” Danes explains. “But I think Aggie was also successfully seduced by Nile.”

At its heart, “The Beast in Me” remains a two-hander between Danes as a wounded warrior struggling to rise and Rhys as an elusive mass of possibilities and contradictions. They spark off each other through beautifully written scenes designed to immerse you in the world of two people discovering what it means to find someone who truly sees you and accepts you in your entirety — even when that entirety drives others away.

The Chilling Conclusion

Aggie’s relationship with Nile has already cost her. When she can’t find FBI agent Abbott, she discovers his hacked live stream showing Teddy held captive. The walls wind up closing in quickly on Nile when his father Martin suffers a stroke upon learning of his son’s latest murders, and Nina finally confronts her husband armed with evidence.

Nina lays out the proof: the journal, the suicide note, her own observations about Madison’s mental state. Nile responds with fury, admitting to the murder and mocking Nina mercilessly for pretending she didn’t know. He even suggests she wanted Madison murdered and used him as a tool. It’s a concept at the heart of the series. “This idea of somebody having a shadow self, having their id become manifest in another person,” Danes says. “What if your most heinous, darkest urges actually come into existence?”

The next day, Nina reveals that she recorded their conversation, and Nile is hauled off to prison. Once his uncle Rick turns state’s witness, Nile pleads guilty. Before he’s taken away by the police, Rick removes Martin’s life support, protecting him from continuing to live in a world with his monstrous son. Aggie’s book (fittingly titled The Beast in Me) is released months later.

Nile takes one final opportunity to needle Aggie about her interest in him. “We did that — together, both of us,” he insists of Teddy’s murder. This will be the last time they meet. In the next scene, he’s stabbed to death by a fellow prisoner: one final fix from his Uncle Rick. “Is it karmic justice? A happy ending?” Aggie asks as she performs a reading from her book. “Retribution is seductive like that, promising a clean line between good and evil. But it’s an illusion. I know, because I felt its pull.”

Aggie is at peace now. “I think she’s faced the ugliest parts of herself,” Danes reflects. “Not indirectly, not metaphorically, not by transferring her own ill will onto some other human — but by recognizing her failures and her own violence. I think she comes to some, maybe not peace with that, but acceptance of it.”

In the final images of the series, we see Nina and her new baby, a small light of doubt lingering in her eyes. Can you pass the beast in you down to the next generation? Nina — and everyone else — is about to find out. “The Beast in Me” is now streaming on Netflix, joining other powerful recent releases that explore the darkness within.