In the early 2010s, seemingly everybody was talking about how television was in the midst of a “golden age.” This beatification of the medium in the teens emerged out of a long-simmering blog-level conversation about whether and how TV was (or had recently become) an “art form,” but now the conversation was starting to go mainstream, jumping the tracks from the AV Club comments section into popular discourse. “From where I sat,” wrote beloved TV critic Alan Sepinwall in his 2013 book on 2000s television, “TV was in the middle of another golden age.” Journalist Brett Martin’s own 2013 TV book, Difficult Men, called it a “golden age” too, drawing meta-attention to how much critics historically love declaring periods of time to be golden ages. “Welcome to TV’s Second Golden Age,” offered CBS Sunday Morning later that year, and no less an authority than Steven Soderbergh proposed the dawn of a “second golden age of television” from a podium at the Cannes Film Festival. In 2014, in The New York Times, David Carr wrote that he was “barely keeping up in TV’s new golden age,” and, by the end of the year, Vanity Fair was asking, seemingly behind the times: “Are We in a Golden Age of Television?”
The irony is that, by the time these outlets were gleefully gilding a decade of prestige television, the critics were getting antsy again. Just as the golden age was being cast, keen observers of the discourse were beginning to hear tell of a new age, not golden, but silver perhaps? But what, exactly, was TV’s “silver age”? To Andy Greenwald, writing in Grantland (talk about golden ages) in 2012, the TV silver age was an exciting new horizon of creative innovation. Anchored by Showtime’s hit espionage drama Homeland, the archetypal series of the silver age was, “a refreshingly artful hybrid: cable brains spliced with network brawn.” If the golden age prior was about premium cable channels striking out on their own, inventing new forms unburdened by network convention, the silver age was about recasting those tried-and-true network conventions with the high-end production values and sex and cursing of the golden age.
But others imagined this silver age as a time of decline. “With an increase in expectations and a glut of new programming,” Hank Stuever wrote in The Washington Post in 2015, “we’ve become accustomed to shows that are, at their best, pretty good instead of brilliant.” I think, in retrospect, that Stuever’s take is prophetic rather than descriptive. Looking back, many of the shows we might associate with this silver age—Homeland (the first season), The Americans, The Leftovers, The Knick, late Mad Men, late Breaking Bad, Halt and Catch Fire, Louie, Girls—have held up as magnificently rewatchable achievements. Stuever was right to observe the beginning of a decline as more and more shows slapped prestige aesthetics on cookie-cutter clones. But he couldn’t have known how much worse it was going to get. Even in 2015, he couldn’t have seen how bad streaming would make things.
I’m doing all this reminiscing from the point of view of a period that Sam Adams has pretty aptly called, “Trough TV.” It is, in some ways, a nightmare hallucination of Stuever’s concerns about the silver age. Even the best shows are copies of copies, the risk-taking Wild West executives of the golden age have been replaced by private-equity goons playing Moneyball with existing I.P., and they just keep making more and worse Game of Throneses. It’s an era of zombies, so it only seems right that the shows our streamers are currently most interested in zombifying are not even shows of that vaunted golden age, but rather, the silver one. Vince Gilligan has a new show on Apple, so does Jon Hamm. Lena Dunham has one on Netflix, so does Keri Russell. And now, Homeland creator Howard Gordon has reunited with Claire Danes as well as The Americans’ Matthew Rhys to bring us The Beast in Me, a silver age supergroup nostalgia tour, now playing on Netflix. There’s not a lot of new material here, and even the hits don’t quite sound the same.
There’s a scene in the second episode of The Beast in Me where we watch Matthew Rhys stand at a kitchen island and consume an entire roast chicken. We’re in medium close-up, and we can hear every crunch and slurp as he sucks every ounce of meat—and seemingly cartilage—off the bone in a bizarre manner Rhys either invented for this performance or has adapted from some obscure Welsh technique. It’s eerily reminiscent of the scene in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King where Denethor houses a chicken and Pippin sings him a sad song, and just as unsettling. It’s a good encapsulation of The Beast in Me’s whole deal. The show is not particularly original, its beats will feel so familiar you’re initially suspicious of them, and its metaphors will clank down upon your head. This man, you see, is a predator. He feasts upon the succulent roast carcasses of his enemies. And he does so with a dead-eyed stare. The chicken scene is thuddingly unsubtle about this. But it’s also, to be perfectly honest, a bit of a treat. Rhys is an absolutely magnetic actor, as menacing as he is charming. And he is, bless his heart, eating this chicken in as interesting a way as it is possible for him to do within the constraints of the scene and its script. Is that enough?
Rhys plays Nile Jarvis, a brash billionaire New York real estate developer who’s just moved to the countryside. He’s relocated there with his new wife, Nina (Brittany Snow), in an effort to stay out of the public eye as he prepares to launch a massive building project—Jarvis Yards—that’s attracted a lot of controversy around its Manhattan building site. But Jarvis isn’t just trying to avoid the gaze of Councilwoman Benitez, the progressive firebrand organizing a movement against Jarvis Yards, he’s also trying to dodge a credible murder accusation. Two years before we meet him, Jarvis’s first wife disappeared, her body never found. After a prolonged and punishingly intimate investigation, the FBI ruled her death a suicide, but that hasn’t changed public opinion all that much. Nile Jarvis, to all the readers of the tabloid mags that stalk him, is still a likely murderer.
His new neighbor, living in a far less palatial country estate down the road, is Aggie Wiggs (Danes). Wiggs is a famed magazine profile writer who has stalled out on the follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir. But it’s not just writer’s block that’s giving Aggie a hard time. Several years before we meet her, Aggie’s young son Cooper died in a car accident. Consumed by grief and by an obsession with the allegedly drunk driver who caused the crash, Aggie’s marriage dissolves, and she spends her days procrastinating, puttering around her decaying house, talking to her scene-stealing pooch, Steve.
Two damaged, possibly damaging people on a collision course with each other. The first two episodes of the show, which dwell at length on Jarvis and Wiggs as they feel each other out and take turns manipulating each other in a series of extended intimate chats, are gripping TV. Rhys imbues his cartoonish villain character with a kind of twitchy impulsiveness that makes him feel one degree less predictable than he might initially appear. When he says something provocatively insulting or childishly cruel, we’re never quite sure whether to read it as a tactic or a tic. It’s hard to tell to what degree Jarvis is in control of his performance.
Danes, for her part, returns fitfully to the Homeland well. Her chin near-constantly aquiver, Wiggs is always on the verge of tears, a woman deep, deep in the midst of a nervous breakdown. But, in her scenes with Jarvis, she comes alive, activating the lethal attentiveness and brazen disregard for danger that made her the prize-winning journalist we’re told she was. In their early interviews, it’s enthralling to watch Wiggs shed her sadness and go in for the kill. But Danes, likewise, portrays Wiggs as someone who’s not fully in control of how and when her grief or her guts take over. Jarvis is, in fits and starts, disarmed by her. Theirs, finally, is a fair fight. Soon after his arrival to town, a townie mysteriously disappears. Partially because she suspects Jarvis, and partially because their tête-à-têtes have reinvigorated her, Wiggs sells her neighbor on the idea of a biography, a chance to set the record straight. Her editor is over the moon, and so Wiggs descends into the world of Nile Jarvis.
All of this early setup is quite promising. The sparring sessions between Rhys and Danes remain the highlights of the series—including an obligatory night of drinking and dancing and spontaneous personal revelation later in the season. But, once the stage is set, that old “network brawn” easily overpowers any of the show’s artful aspirations. In particular, what we begin to notice is how thinly the world outside these two is constructed and, conversely, how much time the show seems to want us to spend in it. There’s the pair of compromised FBI agents hissing warnings at Aggie, there’s Jarvis’s imposing father (Jonathan Banks, another silver age stalwart) grumbling disapproval, there’s the aforementioned Councilwoman Benitez (Aleyse Shannon) shouting clichés through a megaphone—The Beast in Me easily could have leaned into the psychological brinkmanship of Jarvis and Wiggs, but, instead, it insists on becoming a paint-by-numbers political thriller too.
Benitez, in particular, is ill served by the show’s treatment of her plotline. A clear AOC stand-in, the show treats her with the same texture as a “ripped-from-the-headlines” Law and Order case of the week. The show doesn’t so much characterize her as allow us to recognize her Ocasio-Cortez-iness and then fill in the characterization for ourselves. It’s hard to tell whether this caricature of an ambitious progressive activist whose bold leftist politics might be more opportunistic than sincere is the result of lazy or scurrilous writing. On paper, The Beast in Me presents itself as a kind of alternate-universe, celebrity death match, in which present-day AOC squares off against a young hybrid of Robert Durst and Donald Trump in their prime, while a writer for The New Yorker chronicles it all. But in order for that to happen, this show would need to take any of those institutions—the New York left, the New York oligarchs, or the New York press—seriously enough to render them with specificity and nuance. It doesn’t.
Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell were co-stars and became a real-life couple on the set of The Americans—the silver age FX series that I think rivals any of its golden age ancestors. And now, over a decade later, they’re each starring in their own fall Netflix series. Russell’s The Diplomat is a vastly different beast. While it stars a silver age icon, it is very much a return to, and revision of, the golden age network drama The West Wing. Not only does it reinvent that show’s classic walk-and-talk style, but it also proceeds, methodically, as a dissection of that show’s many triumphs and missteps. Its ambivalent relationship to the romance of competence, its defiantly different gender politics, its tortured examination of the costs of Sorkinian belief in the American civic religion—The Diplomat is a work of criticism about its source text. The show has faults all of its own, but it is certainly an attentive and insightful reimagining of a titanic series from a bygone televisual era. If the fate of our current streaming environment is that every show must, in some way, function as a shadow or reflection of some other, older, admirably successful show, then The Diplomat is among the best-case scenarios.
The Beast in Me, less so. Homeland, say, might provide many lessons for The Beast in Me to learn: for instance, what happens to the soul of a political true believer once they become willing to commit crimes in service of that belief? The Americans might hold some lessons too, like: What is the cost of a double life? What intimacy is there to be found in deception? Beast might have consulted Mad Men for its granular depiction of creative, writerly labor or The Leftovers for its flayed depiction of unstoppable grief.
But rather than substantively revive the spirit of any of those shows, The Beast in Me seems content to have its stars, and the vague outlines of its plot suggest these kinds of insights to us, to leave us viewers plenty of space on-screen to fill in our own complexity. It’s easy to remember the feeling of watching Rhys’s Philip Jennings explode in lightning rage or Danes’s Carrie Mathison confidently push further and further past red line after red line. The Beast in Me is neither a reckoning with their era of TV nor a return. But maybe it’s a reminder that every period of seeming decline might one day look like its own golden age in retrospect.