Today's Episode
We watched it. Every episode covers the latest installment(s) of a different TV show.
Today's Episode
The Beast In Me (PILOT)
The Beast in Me, Netflix’s new character-driven thriller, centers on two powerhouses: Claire Danes as novelist Aggie Wiggs, still reeling from the loss of her son, and Matthew Rhys as Nile Jarvis, the suspiciously famous new neighbor who may or may not have killed his wife. The two form an uneasy frenemy dynamic that quickly spirals into consequences. On the pod, we talk about the show’s long road to screen, key trivia, smart comparisons, what sets this series apart, the pilot’s best moments, the standout secondary characters, and our rating.
Tune in. Welcome to Today’s Episode!
Welcome to today's episode of the podcast where we discuss the most recent installment of a different series every show. It is Monday, November 17th, the day that it is said that Abraham Lincoln began his first draft of the Gettysburg Address. Do you know what year that was? 1863, right? That's correct. How'd you know that? Because I know it was two years before he died. Good. Cool. So if we're talking about first drafts, it only took him a couple days before the actual Gettysburg Address. And it was only two minutes, and I think in real life. That explains it why he didn't work that hard on it. Yeah, it just goes down as one of the most famous addresses in all of history. But the beast in me, the first draft of that was quite different than what it ended up being. It ended up taking about five, six years to make. And Gabe Rodder, the guy who made it from X-Files but the Revival series. Oh, okay. He wrote the spec script. He pitched it. It got picked up by Conan's company, the Konako or whatever it's called. And they ended up producing it? Well, no, they were originally supposed to. They they still did produce it, but like, you know, an offshoot when like something goes down different lines of in avenues to get where it was. At one point, originally, we had Jody Foster involved to direct. She's the one who actually got Claire Danes on attached to the project. And then Claire Danes brought in the showrunner from Homeland.
SPEAKER_00:Right, because Jodie Foster, I know she directed some Black Mirror episodes. So I think that's probably where the Netflix connection comes into play. Also, interesting.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. And then Niles character, right? Or Nile, the sort of villain of the series, the real estate mobile. Yeah, he was written more as a Tony Soprano mobster.
SPEAKER_00:Okay. So that was exactly, I even have him tied to tied to Tony Soprano. That was one of my biggest comparisons. Really? How so? Well, I only ever saw the first episode of The Sopranos, but from what I remember, uh, like Tony Soprano was going to therapy, and he was uh like throughout the episode able to do things for the therapist, like get her into a busy diner.
SPEAKER_01:So it's about the favors instantly, like he was connected to this one individual.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, because he kind of owned the town, so he was able to do so. I think he was also rich and like and everyone knows a mob boss. And it's very similar with Niall here, especially when you get to the end of the episode.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. No, that's a good comparison, except that he was more of a family man. He had a daughter. It seemed like he where while Niall could be a sociopath or a psychopath because his wife is missing, his first wife has gone missing, and everybody thinks that he did it, but no one can prove it. Um they were almost skipped skeptical that Matthew Reese could play such a sociopath. They didn't think he was going to be able to do it. He had to audition, uh, and they had he had to convince them that he was able to like bring that dimension to his character because he's such a likable good dude.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, it's the Americans. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, yeah, it's a good thing. That's probably the first time he's had to audition in a while. I would liken him to something like a speak no evil James McAvoy's character. I think that's probably who he's most closely related to.
SPEAKER_01:Before that, would you have guessed that James McAvoy could play?
SPEAKER_00:So I guess he had Yeah, like it was split and all that type of stuff.
SPEAKER_01:Especially when it was in the UK, he was doing a lot of different types of projects. I have a game for you. It's kind of around the same thing. It's like all these uh surround the show, one of them is not true. Okay, this is the first time that Claire Dan's played a lesbian on screen. The second one is Reese prepared for his audition that we just talked about by studying clips of Mark Zuckerberg. The third is that The Beast in Me is also an upcoming film starring Russell Crowe and Luke Hemsworth. And the fourth one is this is the first TV role DeAdre O'Connell, uh the penguin mom, yeah, has had since the penguin, the first penguin.
SPEAKER_00:Oh man, all of these seem like they could be true. Uh you said you said one of them is one no, one of them is false. One of them is false. Okay. Um, I don't think it's the first time that Claire Danes has played a lesbian.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, so that's the one you're saying is false.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. No, it is. She was like, This is my first lesbian. And it's kind of funny because let's talk about uh so Rhea Seahorn was in Pluribus, and then you had uh Betty Galpin in uh Death by Lightning, and then now you have this show with Claire Danes. They all kind of make the same face when they're sad. I'm not saying that they're bad actresses, but I'm saying they could almost be cast in each other's roles, and I wouldn't have been too far thrown from you think you think the main person of Plairibus could have been Rhea Seahorn, right? Yeah, it could have been Agatha here. Yeah, Aggie. I mean, she could have brought a I I think she's similar. She instead of playing a lawyer, she plays a writer or in that yeah, no, she plays a writer in Pluribus. Yeah, no, I mean and this is an author. True. Both working on books.
SPEAKER_00:I see them as different though. I see I see the playeribus person, especially after seeing three episodes, as being more angry a lot of the time. It has more energy to them. Here, Agatha Wiggs is just more downtrodden.
SPEAKER_01:Angry? Yes. Literally, Agatha or Aggie is so mad about the person who killed her son, supposedly, that she almost says to Niall, like, I wish he would die. And Nile goes out and possibly kills him.
SPEAKER_00:That's anger, I think, more from just uh depression than anything.
SPEAKER_01:Furthermore, Rhea Seahorn in Blurribus has just lost her uh her not her wife, but her um girlfriend Helen. And then in this, she's also lost her wife. She lost her son in this. Uh, so they're both dealing with trauma. I see those characters as all very similar.
SPEAKER_00:I guess the shows are so different that I I find the connection kind of murky.
SPEAKER_01:Hmm. Uh would you say that this show is more of a uh instead of a sci-fi series, a neighbor thriller? I was thinking like psychological thriller. That's what I think. Like a psychological thriller series where there's a house in the cover. Right. That's what I mean when I say neighbor thriller. The woman in the house across from the street from the girl in the window, I know that was more of a comedy series, so was based on a true story, but that was sort of or The Watcher, another Netflix show.
SPEAKER_00:Well, it's it's the woman in the house across the street was also a writer, and I find it strange how it's always a writer in these horror like TV shows or psychological thrills.
SPEAKER_01:Is it because of that, or because when you're a writer writing a spec script, it's easy to identify with a character that's also a writer struggling with a script?
SPEAKER_00:I don't know, but it happens all the time. Like I know you season four even had it Castle Rock, The Haunting a Hill House, uh Pluribus, like we mentioned, Shining Vale, and then you get movies like Misery, The Shining 1408. It's always just a writer.
SPEAKER_01:And if I should go back to the Rhea Seahorn uh character in Pluribus, she is struggling to write her own biography, or not biography, but like not the novel that she has been getting famous with. The Waitaro series, I believe, was like kind of a pulp series. I think it was on its fourth book for fans, and she had a stable fan base, but she really, really wanted to do something serious. Well, in this, she's also working on like her second big novel. Her first big novel, uh for for Aggie. What's its what's its name? I didn't get the name. It's named Sick Puppy, which is also the first name of the name of the episode, yeah. Episode, yes. And it's Sick Puppy, A Letter to My Father. You read that Disney book, the one with uh the lady from iCarly, right? Oh, uh I'm glad my mom died or something like that. Yeah, it's a similar vibe, I would think, because it was about her con man dad in this fictional series, and in that it was about her mom who kind of like pushed her into trauma came with that. Pushed her into acting. Pushed her into acting, yeah. So I and then in that Rick and Morty episode that I guess the the recent one where like he has a son and the son got famous by posting a book out there uh going after Morty, right? Yeah, I yeah, it's just a lot of kids tearing down. Is that used as a joke here, or is it like people are supposed to take her seriously?
SPEAKER_00:No, people are supposed to take her seriously. This is not a comedy, I think, by any stretch, unless you want to go with dark comedy just because of how ridiculous Matthew Reese can be at times.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I mean, they changed him from being, like we said, a Tony Soprano type, then they wrote him as a rap mogul, and then they finally kind of changed it to real estate in the same mold of Durst, yeah, Robert Durst, the serial killer, and Donald Trump, the president. So it's a mix of those guys. That's interesting. Oh, and you never answered which was the which was the wrong thing.
SPEAKER_00:Uh, I do think it's the mom's first role since Penguin, so I really don't know.
SPEAKER_01:It was the Reese prepared by watching clips of Mark Zuckerberg. I thought that would be a giveaway because Zuckerberg doesn't do sociopathy well. Like he doesn't make himself seem understanding or or someone that you would want to hang out with because of it.
SPEAKER_00:I thought you always meant like his character. He was re-watching like the Senate hearings back in like 2017 or something like that.
SPEAKER_01:To prep himself up. I thought it was believable, but also like if you thought about it, Niall, the whole episode, is trying to get on Aggie's good side, and he is like pretty cold to her at certain points when he's just or cold is the wrong word. Would would it not be? It's I think it's volatile. That's what I would go with. Right. Like he has no normal filter where it goes from I'm being friendly with you to I'm gonna be brutally honest to a point where I'm gonna just trash on your career.
SPEAKER_00:The only sense of reprieve that he ever has is whenever Agatha brings up her son. Yeah. That's the only time that he ever does.
SPEAKER_01:Do you think he's actually feeling bad when that happens?
SPEAKER_00:I think so, because I think in the restaurant scene, you can see it on his face. He knew that he fucked up in that situation. All right.
SPEAKER_01:So author Aggie Wiggs has receded from public life since the death of her young son, unable to write a ghost of her former self. In episode one, she meets this infamous new neighbor, Niall, who may have killed his wife. The beginning of a beautiful friendship. And I I liked how when we were watching it, you stopped at the part where you saw his wife show up, and you were like, I thought I'm confused. Isn't his wife dead? And it's like, yes, they cast a second wife, and the second wife is played by the girl from that we've seen so many times.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, her name's Nina in the show. And I I'm obviously I think that's supposed to be like they're they're they're so similar. That's why I'm saying I feel like his character is so much like the speak no evil, because I feel like he's manipulated her in such a way where I wouldn't even be, I'm not even sure her real name is Nina, right? Nina and Nile. You've barely seen her in this first episode. Yes, but I'm saying that like there's obviously just something off about it, and we've seen Nile. I'm assuming he's going to go crazy by the end of the by the end of the start.
SPEAKER_01:That's a big assumption. So, like what we actually see in the first episode is he by the end is getting along with Aggie. They have their uh rough patches in between, but yeah, once she's met him and they've uh they've gone to lunch together, that's when she comes clean about the fact that her son's death has really brought this like ominous cloud over her and she hasn't been able to get over it, and that there's this one kid responsible, and she blames him, and then they see that kid. Teddy, yeah, and we see Niles staring at him, and the next thing you know, the next day, Aggie gets a call, and who's telling her what?
SPEAKER_00:Uh that well, Teddy's dead.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, but who told her that?
SPEAKER_00:Uh, was it it was Shelly, right?
SPEAKER_01:I think it was her ex-wife, yes. Yeah, and you she was like, uh, this has got to be such a big shock. And it's more a shock to Aggie because she's like, What did he do? What did I do by telling him about when I knew that he could be a murderer?
SPEAKER_00:I think we need to go back a little bit because what starts it off, what starts Maggie getting so mad at Niall is that he's wanting to open up a jogging pathway inside this forest. Let's start it off even earlier. What's the first scene of the show? It's like a car crash. Yeah, and we learned that uh that's where her son died.
SPEAKER_01:It's the like the only backlash that you get in the first episode, at least.
SPEAKER_00:And Shelly is coming up to uh Shelly again being, I am assuming the wife at the time. Yeah, like they have a kid together. Yeah, but again, I it's ex-wife later on. She goes up to Agathon and is like, where is he? Where is he? And and we learn later on, at least at the gravesite, that the kid was only like eight years old. Really?
SPEAKER_01:Okay, so what I was led to believe is that she was driving and the kid was in the backseat, right? And then this drunk teenager had gone into an accident. However, because he refused to take the uh breathalyzer at the scene, they had to take his blood. And when they finally got the blood results, it was just under the legal limit, meaning that she couldn't press charges and he couldn't be arrested or found completely negligent for this. In fact, I think Aggie may have been blamed. She definitely got a restraining order slapped on her because of the way that she was treating this teenager. Uh, and uh, so when they see him outside hanging out with his friends at the end there, I'm talking later on in the show. That's the thing that Nile like hyper focuses on is like, oh, look at this asshole just living his life, doing his thing.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, it uh it was even before uh Nile saw Teddy that I was like, I don't think Teddy's making it out of this episode. Like the second that he was even at the gravesite with his mom, because it was the eight-year anniversary, I think, of uh Cooper's death. That's the reason why Agatha shows up at the gravesite.
SPEAKER_01:I would think that, yeah, you would try to avoid the big dates on the if you're gonna visit and you know that the mom and you are not on good terms, don't go during the anniversaries.
SPEAKER_00:You know, that's especially during the middle of the day when it's like that's probably the most well, you don't go the middle of the night.
SPEAKER_01:That'd be weird. But uh yeah, so Niall, he's introduced as the neighbor. You also see that we jump into the future and Aggie, she is alone in this big house. She's getting bills that she can't pay. We find out that she's a writer who's struggling, and she has a dog named uh Steve. Steve, yes. Is it Steven? I think no, it's just Steve. Oh, Steve? Just like Steve, what's up with that? Um, and so Niall moves next door, and the first thing that we really hear about him is what? Uh is that well, he has these huge dogs, these huge dogs that keep here. His dogs terrorize Aggie's little dog. And I think that that is an overstatement.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, because all they are doing is barking outside. There's even like a glass pane between the room.
SPEAKER_01:If you've ever lived in any sort of uh urban, suburban, like if you've ever lived anywhere and you aren't used to the fact that dogs bark or can get out and can bark outside your house, like that's not a reason to call the police. Well, even the people the first thing she does, she hears two German shepherds and she instantly picks up the phone and she says, I'm being attacked by two dogs.
SPEAKER_00:Even Niall's cronies or security guards, whatever you want to call them, that come to get the dogs back, they even treated it like it was a really big deal.
SPEAKER_01:They're so good at their jobs. Like they were there almost instantaneously. That's the but she was still got the police call out, which was crazy to me. Um, I think that there was a more effective way of being annoying as a neighbor that also could be excusable. That I think it was just more a vision of Aggie's psyche at that moment that she was so pissed off over the tiniest little things.
SPEAKER_00:But like even the alert system that went off on the middle of the night, I thought was better than and like I understood that more.
SPEAKER_01:Huge house and it's a really loud alarm. And so to complain about that, now the next day he was he's putting wine in front of her house, and that's also very similar to Fluribus, where the the aliens of such, you know, the humans are giving her gifts, and in this case it's Niall giving her the gifts.
SPEAKER_00:Can I just be honest though? Agatha was so unlikable, and that wine scene, she she just came off as very hostile and dismissive because they're giving her wine, she brings it back over to the house. That's where she meets Nina at first. And even after Nina says that she is a huge fan of Agatha, Agatha is just like not even wanting to talk to her. She's wanting to give the wine back, and then Nina came up with like the actual idea of like, well, why don't you throw a house party or just keep it? And she's like, No, no, no, I don't want this wine at all.
SPEAKER_01:Because she knows that it's like a given to her by someone who could be a killer, which is, I guess, hard to swallow that. Like, how do you put that up on the shelf and someone comes in and it's like, hey, guess who gave me this gift? Um, the other thing is that she's being coerced into giving, that's how she feels about it, into giving this permission for this jogging thing, which she could not care less about, but just being kind of like continually bugged about it when you've got all this other stuff going on in your life that you're usually traumatized by. It just I can understand why she would not feel good taking that gift.
SPEAKER_00:It's just between that and between the dogs, her acting like that was a bigger deal than it was, and being just very intrusive and confrontational, fixated on blaming. I mean, I understood she was mad when Teddy was there, but telling him you should have been the one that died in that crash and the throwing the flowers off the grave, it just seemed like I couldn't get behind her. Did you ever see Homeland?
SPEAKER_01:No. Okay. Her character is kind of similar in that. She has bipolarism in that. Um, so it's a little bit more excusable, but her going off the deep end or her like screaming, it like always it's like Claire Danes is uh she she lives in that, but then she also like does smart things with her characters and they'll like have sporadic moments of genius.
SPEAKER_00:She has some sympathy with her son dying. I'm just saying, after multiple acts of wrongdoing in the first episode, it was hard for me to really root for her character.
SPEAKER_01:Were you rooting for other characters? So like Brittany's uh Brittany Snow has had a crazy year this year. Um, she was in the Hunting Wives, she started in that. She was in Murdoch, uh Death in the Family, and now she's in The Beast in Me. I think each one has dropped like month, month, month. And uh they even asked her about it, and she was just like, Yeah, sometimes you win. Sometimes Hollywood's not that great. The year 2025 is just her. Yeah, no, no, no. Um, but between her, Jonathan Banks, you saw a picture of him. Yes, she we see a picture of him. He's not actually in the show.
SPEAKER_00:Is it your favorite character? Probably, yeah. Okay, no, uh seeing him pop up at the very end, just uh just walking right next to Niall is pretty funny.
SPEAKER_01:It's almost like Apple in that it has a very small cast. Yes, yeah, but like a Netflix series.
SPEAKER_00:But I think it does a good job of tricking people into thinking that the show is actually bigger than it really is. Right.
SPEAKER_01:And so they have this lunch, and let's describe the lunch a little bit.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, so it's the most uncomfortable scene of 2025. It was a long scene because uh Matthew Reese just you're never sure what he's going to say to uh Agatha because they're having this lunch um because he feels like they've gone off on the wrong foot. At least that's how he puts him when he's at the house. Really, it's just a plea for him to try and put this jogging park in play. And uh, and they're talking and talking, and he's uh trying to kind of learn more about her life. She's talking about how she had an abusive father growing up, and then he starts asking her what she did with the money after she wanted to kill his father.
SPEAKER_01:But he got rich on his back. Like that is so like, wouldn't you rather be in the position where you are now, given like you that that experience made you who you are rather than not have it at all?
SPEAKER_00:But you're making it seem like in the show, Matthew Reese, I feel like is the savior of the series because he's the one thing that the story has going for it that's different. You never know if he how he's going to react, if it's just going to be with a slight remark or if he's just going to blow up like uh in the scene. It looks like he's always one step away from, as you put earlier with Agatha, going off the deep end. And we even see that by the end of that uh restaurant conversation.
SPEAKER_01:I think he knows the limits, but he's not afraid to go to the limit. For instance, he knows that if he sees someone take a picture of him, and it's funny because he's not like a celebrity where they're Hollywood, where everybody would know who he is, but it seems like they're treating him that way because the person who ended up taking the the picture was just some mom and her daughter.
SPEAKER_00:Because he because he ends up going over there, asks her to delete it, the mom refuses.
SPEAKER_01:Well, it was like she was taking it for paparazzi, almost and he didn't like that, but he destroyed her phone, knowing that his security would come in and make it right. Now I am curious, what if the mom had like been like, no, I'm still gonna press charges? Like, would he just have to deal with it?
SPEAKER_00:I was a little curious why. I mean, that was such obviously a huge thing to take, why Agatha was just kind of okay with it. I get that she understands he's powerful and has connections.
SPEAKER_01:It's not that she respects him or that she's necessarily okay with it. I think she just like sort of understands him. She's fed up with life, she's upset that no one understands her pain the same way, that no one wants to see this kid get justice. She feels like it's been a miscarriage of justice. So she could give two shits about anything but herself. She's in a very selfish moment. And she, I think, identifies that with Niall, who's also a very selfish person. And I think that they see that within themselves. And so that's where this show differs, then from what your regular like murder mystery uh neighbor show is, where like you're looking suspiciously at your neighbor and wondering what's going on. I think that where it's heading is sort of that you have Aggie's character lining up with, not teaming up with, but like almost sympathizing with the person who could be a murderer.
SPEAKER_00:That's that's a very interesting way to go about it. I do think that one of my pros for the show is that I don't know where it's going. Matthew Reese obviously has some connection to Teddy uh and how he died. So I want to see What do you mean by obviously? Because that's kind of the whole ditty. They show you, uh they show you the part. Well, I mean, like uh he was looking at him and coincidence is a menacingly, menacingly as they were outside the.
SPEAKER_01:Coincidence that his wife is missing, coincidence that Teddy shows up dead the second that he asks her, coincidence that you got a strange FBI guy popping in there being like, don't trust this guy.
SPEAKER_00:Brian Abbott, why is he so cryptic in his warning? He was drunk, he was drunk, but that still doesn't explain. If he has information and he's going so far as to knock on her door at the middle of the night, why wouldn't he just be like, This is the problem with Niall? This is what he's doing.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, this is my guess, and this is just based on absolutely nothing. But I think Brian was having an affair with Niles Nile with Nile, his name is so weird. It's Nile Jarvis, yes, with Niall Jarvis's wife. And I think that I have absolutely nothing to base that off of, but I think he was put in charge of the investigation to find out.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, are you saying his wife that guy that that uh that's like gone missing?
SPEAKER_01:Yes, that's who that's why the FBI was investigating. So not Nina, yeah. And so I think that she, yes, not Nina. Uh, I think that when they called off the investigation, maybe he fell in love with her via the investigation. He never actually had the affair. Maybe it was an emotional affair that just by reading her case file. And so he got so invested into it that when they let this guy go, he followed him to this new town and he's still trying to get him, you know? And then he sees this other lady falling into the same traps as everyone else who's just like put over by this guy's personality because he's got a confidence, a vibrato to him.
SPEAKER_00:He reminds me a little bit, a little bit of the uh day of the jackal villain. He's also a billionaire, also a sociopath.
SPEAKER_01:Um, and so yeah, so he's trying to get ahead of it and he gets drunk, and so he can't straight up say, Hey, I'm following this guy, and I technically shouldn't be doing this, but he does feel like he has to warn her. And so he shows up like the villain in Scream, just pounding on her door in the middle of a storm, saying, I gotta avoid the censors, um, and and then gives her this warning. Now she doesn't take it very well.
SPEAKER_00:Well, of course she wouldn't take it well because he doesn't explain anything. I didn't like how Brian Abbott, again, I feel like if he is he was very adamant that there's something wrong with Niles. If he has any information, he Nile, yes. If he has any information, he should have just been, even if it like incriminated him somewhat, he could have taken that part out of the story and just been like, here's the problem with Niall. He's drunk, here's how crazy is it's hard to explain things when you're drunk. I should know.
SPEAKER_01:I do this podcast drunk all the time. No. Um it's uh he uh he also uses the um Kendrick Lamar line, not like us. Nial, not like us.
SPEAKER_00:That was not the first thing I thought of when I heard that line, though.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Uh what did you think of Natalie Morales? That is Shelly. Like, she clearly doesn't want like to be in Aggie's life anymore. Yeah. But at the same time, did you recognize her?
SPEAKER_00:No, I didn't. From Stuber? Would not have been able to put that together, but you're talking about the daughter, I think. Um yeah, I know. But the thing about Shelly is that after the whole entire Teddy meltdown at the grave site, she does they do bond a little bit. Like uh, I know that Agatha is telling her she's working on her anger, and and Shelly's like glad to hear it.
SPEAKER_01:Reminds me a lot of Pleurubus when she's bonding with the uh humans that have like embraced the um personality of her her previous uh girlfriend, you know? You keep on going to Fluribus. I do, because the second you said it's not like it, I was like, it actually is very much alike. Um a little more prestigious than a Harlan Coben mystery, is how it's been said to in the in the reviews. Do you want to go into yours first?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. So uh again, I think Matthew Reese, he is the one character you think of even while he's not on screen. I think that his acting is good. I think the restaurant scene was again probably the best out of the whole show, which is saying something because it was probably the longest scene out of the series.
SPEAKER_01:I just like watching the guy since I've seen The Americans.
SPEAKER_00:I had a visceral reaction and I put it down as a pro because uh it's exactly what the show wanted me to feel whenever it showed the sludge in the drains.
SPEAKER_01:Like oh, that's right. I didn't even remember the show.
SPEAKER_00:So so much so like it's just backing up, so gross. Yeah. And then where does the show go now? It's also very straightforward. I feel like there's not a lot of subtext, which is good for a series like this. However, it's predictable. I feel like Agatha is too unlikable. Don't really like Brian Abbott. How many characters do we need? There's also some terrible lines early on. Agatha is talking to a neighbor about Niall's putting in the pathway to the forest. And the neighbor is like, hey, you might, you might, yeah, Niall. He's like, you might want to be careful with what you do. And then she says, What's he gonna do? Murder me? Right. I thought I thought that was a terrible foreshadowing line. So I'm going to give the series a five out of ten.
SPEAKER_01:That was the joke. She was saying, I know this guy. Like, it's like if you live next to OJ.
SPEAKER_00:It's it's five out of ten. It's a it's junk food entertainment. I just don't expect anything amazing from the show.
SPEAKER_01:Do you think that the stuff coming out of the drain is sort of like a Macbeth thing where like she can't rid herself of because it's like bloody. Yeah. And it's like her son's death, and she blames herself, even if she says that it's Teddy's.
SPEAKER_00:I was thinking like the fly kind of with Breaking Bad, where really like it's all in his mind.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah. There's a couple things I want to say about the show right before getting into the reviews, is that a Beast and Me. Uh, that's that Johnny Cash song, the famous one. And the showrunner, it's interesting because, like I said, he did Homeland. He actually did 24 before that. He's talked about bringing Kiefer Sutherland back for another season to close up the storyline.
SPEAKER_00:Oh my god, haven't they made like 10 of those already?
SPEAKER_01:10 seasons worth. Uh, yeah, but again, they opened it up again and then they never closed the door. He said that whether it's Monica Lewinsky or Amanda Knox or Niall Jarvis or whatever, sometimes we are quick to make assumptions, but when we are forced to look at it from a different angle, do we have the same or do we have the humility and compassion to listen and to revise the narrative? That makes it seem like if I've been giving Niall a pass, it's because of that quote. Monica Lewinsky and Amanda Knox are seen as victims of the media. Had he said something like Elizabeth Holmes, Bell Gibson from Apple Cider Vinegar, um, or Martin Scarelli, the guy who served prison for you know the drugs that he like hiked the prices of, he didn't.
SPEAKER_00:He used two victims of the media, making so you're saying Agatha is really the one, but like that's maybe subconsciously being evil.
SPEAKER_01:No, I I think it's like how Aggie sees her, because that's supposed to be how the audience sees him. Uh whether or not she becomes complicit in what he's possibly doing. But it's like if he ends up actually being the murderer, then it won't make sense, then this quote won't make any sense. No, it would have been gaslighting.
SPEAKER_00:I understand that, but my thing, my problem with that is that it happened so and I get it.
SPEAKER_01:That might be the joke of the series. Is like it happens. And that Niall is just a dick.
SPEAKER_00:But it would just be so coincidental in that way. I'm not gonna say the thought didn't cross my mind, but like it just doesn't make sense.
SPEAKER_01:It's something you don't usually see ever, because usually it's always like there's a reason for being conspiratorial or when you're watching TV and movies and stuff.
SPEAKER_00:There are reasons to believe that she's an unreliable narrator. So yeah, there's that too.
SPEAKER_01:Um, it's got a four. Uh Vulture gave it a four out of five for its premiere. Uh, it has a 7.2 on IMDB. The Rotten Tomatoes score, both critic and uh audience are are in the 70s and 80s. So it's been reviewed rather well. I don't they they said originally the script was just way too fat and uh like they had everything they possibly could chuck into it, and this is it whittled down to like its core. It's not like it's not obscenely long, but it is like a 50-minute pilot. And they also brought in Antonio Campos, who did a docuseries, The Staircase, the one with Colin Farrell, got pretty good reviews. It seems like they really did want to separate this. They were like, we're gonna get some higher talent than we normally do. We're also gonna bring in a high talent director, a homeland guy. We're gonna have uh originally Jody Foster attached. The Conan O'Brien one doesn't add up to me. Well, I know that's the weird one. He he's been drifting into serious stuff. He's into drama. Yeah. So this one's five years ago. This and the only other thing I've done. He's been doing it for a long time. No, no, but he's been doing like four Final space. That was what he was teaming up with back in the day. Like those are comedies and animated comedies. Like this is this is something different. What would you give it out of 10? I don't know. I I think I'll reserve my answer on that one since it's technically your your pick for this one. So five out of 10, right? Thanks for listening. We'll see you on the next episode. Hope you enjoyed this one. Bye.
SPEAKER_00:Bye.