It's an interesting marker of how the TV industry has evolved in recent years that announcing a big new show might not just mean showing off the stars – it can also involve boasting about the creators. In eras gone by, these people would have been unsung heroes, but Netflix has underlined how important they can be to the public by loudly boasting about them for its newest series.
The Beast in Me just got its first teaser trailer ahead of its release on 13 November, and while its stars Clare Danes and Matthew Rhys are hugely important, it's also keen to underline that the show is made by the same team that created Homeland, which also starred the first of those actors.
Anyone who enjoyed Homeland would probably have suspected (or hoped for) the connection anyway, the moment they saw Danes in the trailer, but to have it confirmed so early is great news. It should also help to build a lot of hype for a very interesting-looking thriller series.
The Beast in Me looks like it'll star Danes as Aggie, a grieving writer who finds herself alone for the first time, and Rhys as Nile, her new neighbour. It doesn't take long for them to get to know each other, and not much longer than that for Aggie to start suspecting that Nile might be a murderer. Netflix's blurbs on the show make it sound like the story could be more complicated than that, though.
The big questions swirl around an episode from Nile's past, and it'll take eight episodes for the story to run its course, so expect a whole heap of twists and turns along the way. We'll doubtless also learn more about what brought Aggie to this point, and whether she herself might be more conflicted than she first seems.
The comments under the trailer are wildly positive, as a good early sign for Netflix. One person wrote: "YAY CLAIRE DANES! :) She is incredible." That's the sort of sentiment that executives dream of from just a short teaser, so we'll see how it lasts when we get a longer trailer sometime in the next month (I'd wager).
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