Aggie Wiggs, the successful author played by Claire Danes in the Netflix series The Beast in Me, is suffering from writer’s block. The cause, she believes, is her uncontrollable rage toward the other driver in a car accident she was in two years earlier that took the life of Cooper, the young son she and her wife Shelley (Natalie Morales) were raising in a posh Long Island suburb. Aggie is convinced that the other driver, a local teenager named Teddy, was drunk, but this was never proved because Teddy had refused to take a Breathalyzer test at the scene of the crash.
Why so many smart female characters on TV these days have wives instead of husbands is not relevant here, because the story is not about Aggie and Shelley, who are estranged. It is about Aggie and Nile Jarvis (Matthew Rhys), the billionaire who moves into the mega-mansion next to Aggie’s unfixed fixer-upper. Nile is notorious for having been acquitted of the murder of his wife, whose body was never found. He has retreated to Long Island to escape the bad publicity and the controlling ways of his father, a thuggish Manhattan real estate magnate.
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