I watched the most popular series on Netflix right now, a show that forces us to confront our own demons

All of us are drawn to monsters. We are fascinated by the fantasy that anyone brave enough to throw a stone can bring down Goliath. We play the hero, the savior, the bold and righteous one, and so we hunt the beasts that stalk us, convinced that our own violence will be the thing that protects us. But does it really protect us? When we defeat Goliath or kill the dragon, we know deep down that the real threat remains within us, always present. I wrote down this line from the main character last night at around four in the morning, right after I binge watched The Beast In Me in one sitting. The night before, I was also awake at four, coming home from the city and plotting revenge on my own Goliath. You should not let the need to prove something suffocate you, a friend told me when I called him in a panic. I wrote that down too.

Revenge lies at the heart of the new Netflix series that critics are already praising, with an impressive 84 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. It is the kind of story that promises a clear line between good and evil, tempting you and pulling you into its own darkness. At first, it seems simple, even noble: justice for pain, an answer to injustice. But in the desire to restore balance, you slowly become what you are running from; the anger that was meant to punish the other begins to shape you; and that thick sediment now seeps into your own code.

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Claire Danes has spent years flawlessly portraying women on the verge of emotional collapse. From the bipolar spy in Homeland who functions better when she skips her medication, to the abuse survivor battling Victorian morality and a deadly sea creature in The Essex Serpent. In The Beast in Me she continues that trajectory as Aggie Wiggs, a rigid, withdrawn writer who has not been able to put down a single word since her son died in a car accident four years ago. The car was hit by a drunk driver, and that young man survived without a scratch and without a negligent homicide charge. The grief that consumes her only further clouds her judgment. Wracked with guilt and hatred, Aggie has pushed away her former wife (Natalie Morales) and now stews alone in her large, ghostly Long Island home, where the clogged plumbing mirrors her own choked emotional state.

When Nile Jarvis (Matthew Rhys), a spoiled rich man and sociopath suspected of killing his first wife, moves into the house next door, he begins to slip into every corner of her previously isolated life. He repels her and attracts her at the same time, defying logic, and even though she seems to have the answers from the start, almost instinctively, she agrees to meet him, to write a book about him, and perhaps to change her mind. After years of speculation surrounding his wife’s disappearance, he sees this as a chance to clean up his reputation, and she sees it as an opportunity to explore a subject that is both fascinating and deeply challenging to write about.

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The first half of the series feels like a character study. Nile is an obnoxious jerk, and there is really no more elegant way to put it. He is the heir to a real estate empire, and Matthew Rhys plays him with zero self awareness, which is to say, perfectly. He interrupts his wife by simply shouting over her. He believes everyone else exists to entertain him, and he sees nothing wrong with that belief. At lunch, he orders for you without asking. After dinner, he invites himself to your apartment and behaves as if it were his own, all while trying to charm you in a chilling way. And yes, he almost certainly killed his wife. Or rather, his first wife, because of course Nile Jarvis, in his forties, is already on wife number two. Spoiler alert: precisely because The Beast in Me never pretends that Nile is anything other than what he is, the downside is that it spends far too long, across eight episodes, circling the question of whether this man is truly a murderer.

Still, I had the sense that no matter how obvious the plot twists are, the series aims to explore every shade of those twists, the inner conflicts, instincts, and demons, the conscious and unconscious layers that lurk within each of us. It asks what separates impulse from action and belief from truth. If it were up to me, the series would plunge even deeper into that darkness, especially when the main character keeps joking about killing his wife and the other remains inexplicably drawn to him, because we all know how dangerous that kind of romanticization can be.

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Like Aggie’s writing, The Beast in Me took a long time to mature. It is surprising to learn that this is the first major work of its creator, writer, and executive producer Gabe Rotter, who wrote it five years ago and has since worked on various projects, including the final season of The X Files. Everything moved forward when Howard Gordon, one of the creators of Homeland and another former member of The X Files team, joined the series as showrunner and reworked Rotter’s story. Even without the two extraordinary performances from Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys, both of whom are already being predicted as Emmy contenders, the screenplay, the style, and the confidence with which this psychological thriller is written would be enough to consider it exceptional. Especially as a powerful reminder not to let our hunt for the monster suffocate us in the end, rob us of our sanity, or take away our vital capacity for self reflection.