‘The Beast in Me’ Showrunner Knows That the Violent Murder Scene Was a “Potential Tune-Out Point” For Some Viewers

The Beast in Me showrunner Howard Gordon knows there was one scene in the Netflix limited series that was divisive because of its brutality. “There were people for whom that was a potential tune-out point. Maybe some others tuned in extra because of it. It’s hard to tell,” Gordon, producer of 24 and Homeland , tells THR .

The scene in question is — spoiler alert — the flashback scene in which Nile Jarvis’ (Matthew Rhys) wife, Madison (Leila George), is violently killed. The moment answers the question the entire show sets up, and the question Claire Danes’ character, Aggie, who is grappling with the death of her son, tries to answer while writing a book about her mysterious neighbor: Did he or didn’t he kill his wife? Related Stories TV The TikTok Comment That Let Megan Gallagher Know She Nailed the Representation of Motherhood in 'All Her Fault' TV 'Paradise' Executive Producer Explains Why Julianne Nicholson's Character Had to Go Down with the Bunker in Season 2

Gordon breaks down with THR why The Beast in Me was a hard premise to tackle and why Rhys was the right guy to play Nile.

I know Gabe Rotter wrote this six or seven years ago, and it took a while to gain momentum. Why do you think it was such a difficult premise to get moving?

A couple things. I think the secret of the pilot and Gabe’s creation is a character who is a writer [Danes], who is stuck really in this existential kind of “stuckness” because of this terrible loss. Those things were very evident in the premise.

But when she has a killer move in next door, or someone she suspects to be that, and writes this book … writing a book about somebody is a pretty static idea, so we had to find the dramatics of what happens. What does that cat-and-mouse actually look like?

Nile in the earlier version was kind of exiled to the suburbs but was painting. These two solitary characters who don’t have a lot of people around them, that’s not a very dramatic premise. It’s a very challenging premise. So we gave Nile [the real estate development] Jarvis Yards. He has still been exiled, but he still has a very important hand in a very big, controversial development. And who is his father? And Aggie’s relationship had to be explored. There were a lot of balls in the air, but what was evident to us was this essential loss, this essential grief, which is the most unimaginable thing any of us can go through and that universal fact of loss and how it can bend us. But there were too many multiple traumas and trauma swappings that wound up obscuring the issues. So most of it was about clearing the brush and finding the story.

Before the final reveal, the audience is constantly left wondering whether Nile did it or didn’t. How did you keep it in the gray zone?

The journey of whether he is or isn’t [a killer] … keeping that possibility open [was important], but ultimately we have to also look at the audience’s awareness of: If he wasn’t, where would the story go? We planted certain flags at various points.

Part of the other problem was that there were these backstories of Aggie’s own loss, of Nile’s previous marriage and that unsolved mystery.