The streaming TV era has granted great actors plentiful opportunities to star in melodramatic hokum, and in the case of The Beast in Me, it’s Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys who are the beneficiaries of this new world order.

An original tale that nonetheless feels like it must have been adapted from an airport paperback novel, Howard Gordon’s eight-part Netflix show, premiering Nov. 13, is an expertly performed and assuredly directed saga about storytelling, self-delusion, and murder that never stops playing familiar narrative games and indulging in overwrought exposition. Overcooked and non-nutritious, it’s a series fit to be consumed and then promptly forgotten.

The most striking aspect of The Beast in Me is that it’s shot and edited with an honest-to-goodness cinematic eye courtesy of

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