It’s a classic thriller executed with such panache that at times you feel you’re in the middle of someone’s nervous breakdown. But you won’t want to look away for a second.

This is a cerebral thriller of the highest order, and that’s reflected in the writing, acting — Danes, Rhys and Snow are all deserving of accolades — and the direction.

The Beast In Me benefits from a focused story that puts its Emmy-winning leads in a good position to do their best work, especially when they’re on screen together.

With each revelation that's made, including one shocking discovery that Brian makes in the third act, the series becomes more of a nail-biter.

The series is twitching, but it’s not really alive. There is, in the end, a deadness to its clichés about writers and their subjects. It’s “The Journalist and the Murderer,” rotted with overplotting and kitsch. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t love the show, or its pretensions to real storytelling, given how offensively rote some television has become. .... Ultimately, the series gives too much gravity to the writer-subject dialectic.

The muddied narrative does its job in pitting Danes and Rhys together in scene after scene, but it also keeps the show from being as vicious as it should be, leaving them to make up the difference.

It's the kind of daft assembly line thriller that you'd normally expect to see fired out of Netflix's Harlan Coben machine, or perhaps aired across three consecutive nights on 5; but the money and star-power behind this one does give it a certain charm.