The Beast in Me is one of those ‘taut psychological thrillers’ that everyone talks about in the office. This might sound disparaging – as it is, obviously – but I have to admit that, having succumbed in desperation (because, as usual, there is so little else on), I did find the show pretty addictive and unusually satisfying.

What makes it stand out is that it doesn’t go for the obvious. Yes, its heroine – played by Claire Danes – is feisty, talented and capable. But she’s also whiny, uptight and really quite unsympathetic, as perhaps screenwriter Gabe Rotter intended when he gave her the weirdly repellant name Aggie Wiggs.

Aggie, a Pulitzer Prize winner, has made enough money from washing the dirty linen of her dysfunctional upbringing in her bestselling misery memoir to buy an expensive house on Long Island. Unfortunately, she now has writer’s block, having finally recognised that her next project – about the friendship between Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her ideological opposite Antonin Scalia – might be too dull even for the book groups that so evidently relished the pretentious prose of her overwritten debut.

Also, she is still in mourning for her eight-year-old son, whom she shared with her much-nicer ex-wife Shelley (Natalie Morales).........

© The Spectator