One thing that I tend to take notice of in a film or a series is whether or not the people making it had enough material to make it the length that they end up making it, whatever it happens to be.
In films we see the "bloat" happen a lot less frequently although since it has been determined apparently a long time ago, that films need to be 90 minutes long or more, often films can have a bunch of filler that doesn't do anything for the story or the characters, simply for the sake of making the film longer.
With series, this is far more noticeable than it is with films. Often there were be "padding episodes" normally buried in the middle of a season, where relatively useless aspects of the overall plot are pursued, none of which has any sort of impact on the overall trajectory of the series. While not the biggest violator I have seen (this non-award goes to the Punisher series) The Beast in Me certainly does utilize this very tiresome tactic in their pursuit to have 8, 1-hour long episodes in season 1.
Because of this, I can't really recommend this show even though it is pretty well done when they get to it and actually focus on the main point of the plot.
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This show is a crime thriller of sorts where a best-selling author Aggie Wiggs ends up being the next door neighbor of a man whose wife disappeared under suspicious circumstances and through happenstance the two of them end up teaming up to write her next book and have it be about him instead of what she was planning on doing (and was failing to make much progress on) when they meet one another.
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The next door neighbor in question is Nile Jarvis, who is a real-estate developing multi-millionaire type who is aggressive and tactful in everything that he does and Aggie at first doesn't trust him at all, but upon reflection she realizes that he is correct in his opine that her current choice of book is not a good topic and that she should write about him.
They get down to actually making that happen in a series of events that honestly, take too long and this is part of the reason why I started to feel as though they were intentionally dragging things out. I mean, we, as the viewers are blindingly aware of the fact that she is going to say yes to the idea otherwise there is no show so I don't really see the point in dragging out this decision across multiple episodes. It gets tiresome pretty quick.
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I have to hand it to Claire Danes for her role of playing Aggie. She does a wonderful job of portraying a semi-washed-up author who is suffering from writer's block as well as battling some inner demons created by tragic circumstances that have happened in her recent past. I have intentionally not mentioned what they are for the sake of avoiding spoilers.
I did also feel a little bit bad because seeing Claire all old and wrinkly made me feel a bit old and wrinkly. I remember back when she was youthful and considered a sex-symbol many years ago. What can I say? We all have to get old, right?
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Some of you may react the way that I did in my happiness to see Jonathan Banks be in something again. His role in this series isn't too much of a departure from his character, I think it was "Mike" from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. As you would expect, he steals every scene that he is in but don't get your hopes up too high because he isn't in very many of them.
As the story (very very slowly) gets moving, we get to see that there is a lot more to what is going on than just writing a book about a man who the world believes is a murderer even though he was never convicted of any such crime. We are kept in a perpetual ping-pong match of emotion as we attempt to determine whether or not Nile actually is a monster, or if he is just a victim of circumstance while being on the wrong side of the press.
They do a very good job with this: At no point in time are you very certain whether or not he is guilty and just when you think you have it all figured out, they do some pretty clever switcharoos on us.
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While the story is told primarily from Aggie's point of view, there are also glimpses into the FBI investigations as well as corruption of politics and how money truly does control everything in this world. I appreciated a lot of that.
What I didn't appreciate was the fact that basically the entire middle of this series could have not even been episodes (especially episodes 5 and 6) and almost nothing about the story would have changed. The sequences where Aggie runs off to have drawn out conversations with her ex have absolutely nothing to do with the overall story and to me seemed entirely like filler in order to ensure they had 8, 1-hour episodes to push out the door to Netflix.
This isn't enough reason to not watch it though because despite this very big problem, it still manages to be one of the better series that exist right now on the market. Also, this series is fully released so you don't have to get annoyed about it being released 1 week at a time which seems to be the trend in series on most streaming services these days.
Should I watch it?
If you can get past the fact that the center parts of nearly every episode outside of 1 and 8 is often filler designed to eat up the 1-hour required duration of each episode then I think you will do just fine. For me, this meant walking around my house and doing other things while I simply listened to the dialogue. Doing so resulted in me not missing a damn thing too.
I really wish they hadn't done this because they could have not done that, and just had this thing be 6 episodes instead of 8. I would imagine that it is pretty difficult to come up with 8 hours or material, but I also don't understand why it is that streaming services, especially streaming services that pump out all the episodes at a single point in time, decide to do this. To me it just seems unnecessary. The only justification that I can come up with is that while they were filming it or even before they had even sold it, they needed to make it appeal to a wide range of potential buyers. Perhaps they didn't know Netflix was going to pick it up. I don't know how these sorts of things work.
Even though it does suffer from bloat, there is a lot of entertainment value to be had here and it is a good story with very competent actors for the most part.
So while I will warn you that there are going to be moments where you are screaming internally "get on with it already!" it is still worth seeing and I fully intend to finish the last two episodes by the end of the day.
The only way to legally watch this at the moment is through a standard Netflix subscription