Howard Gordon has long been synonymous with high-octane, high-stakes television, having shaped the landscape of serialized dramas with iconic shows like “The X-Files” and the Emmy-winning, clock-ticking phenomenon, “24.” Most recently, he redefined the modern geopolitical thriller as the showrunner of “Homeland.” Given this résumé, the transition to the slower burning, psychological domestic suspense of “The Beast in Me” might seem like an unexpected evolution, but the Netflix limited series quickly proved that Gordon’s mastery of tension and character architecture translates perfectly to the most intimate and toxic of settings.
The series, which captured audience attention immediately upon release in November, centers on author Aggie Wiggs (Claire Danes) and her obsession with her neighbor, the formidable Nile Jarvis (Matthew Rhys), a man widely suspected of having murdered his wife. While the foundation of the story, a woman pursuing a subject who might be a killer, originated as a spec pilot by Gabe Rotter, its journey to the screen was complex. Gordon readily describes his role not as the creator, but as the “midwife,” explaining that the script had a compelling premise but “they could never quite crack it.”
The challenge, as Gordon details, lay in transcending a “static premise.” A story focused merely on an author and her subject talking risks being “inert.” The writers needed to find the dramatic mechanism to propel the narrative beyond psychological theory and into thrilling action. This required meticulous creative excavation, asking fundamental questions: “Who is his father? Who is this guy?” and “What does Nile do?” It was about establishing the necessary stakes and building a believable world of wealth and influence around Nile Jarvis to fully realize the cat-and-mouse tension.
Gordon’s experience in running serialized narratives proved crucial to solving these architectural problems. Citing the basic constuact of “The X-Files” (the audience must eventually know there are aliens) and “Homeland” (the audience must eventually know Sergeant Brody’s guilt), Gordon understood that the show could not indefinitely dangle the question of Nile’s culpability. Instead, the focus was shifted to Aggie’s deteriorating mental state and the audience’s awareness, creating a sophisticated push-and-pull with her paranoia. This approach, he notes, avoids “schmuck bait” and ensures the journey to the truth is what sustains interest.
The alchemy of the project was realized through its casting. Gordon drew parallels between casting Matthew Rhys as the sociopathic Nile and the initial surprise success of casting Damian Lewis in “Homeland,” noting that Rhys “just raised it to a level none of us expected.” Similarly, the casting of Brittany Snow, whose character’s arc was initially thin, immediately brought such depth to her audition that the character’s role in the final story was expanded, proving that sometimes, “you always have to let the story kind of find itself.”
The result is a show that trusts its audience to appreciate deliberate pacing. Gordon defends the show’s length, asserting that sometimes “you have to slow down to speed up.” He points to the critical success of scenes, such as the initial long lunch between Danes and Rhys, as proof that trusting the rhythm and allowing great, carefully scripted dialogue to breathe, pays off. The challenge in television, he concludes, is trusting one’s “interior kind of rhythm” over network pressure to constantly accelerate.
In speaking with Awards Focus, Howard Gordon offers a masterclass in modern television production, illustrating how even an established premise requires radical restructuring and faith in performance to become an award-worthy hit. In the following conversation, Gordon discusses the difficult decisions behind the show’s structure, the brilliance of the casting process, and his philosophy on pacing in the era of binge-watching.
AF: I am a big fan of the show, having screened it just before release. The immediate reaction on Netflix suggests people started it and quickly binged the entire series. I’d love to hear about the original spark of the idea. I know your background is in “X-Files” and “24,” and this is a very different type of show. Where did the idea originate?
Gordon: Yeah, we’ve been around for a while. So it was created by Gabe Rotter. It was a spec pilot that he wrote that had been in development for a bunch of years with Claire. Claire, after “Homeland,” had a production deal, and this was a script that came to her through Jodie Foster. They developed it and tried to sort of get it going. Again, it was one of those things that was a very interesting premise, but they could never quite crack it. So I came on a couple of years in. And with Daniel Pearle, who’s a young writer with whom I’d worked, we kind of recrafted with Gabe a new approach to this premise. It was an idea about a woman who had essentially a lot of the contours of it were there, but it hadn’t quite found itself. I can’t claim credit for the creation of it, but kind of more for the midwifing than for the birth, I guess, is the best way I would describe it.
AF: When you say the show “hadn’t quite cracked it yet,” what specific dramatic elements were missing?
Gordon: There were ideas in there about a woman who was experiencing this particular kind of loss, but what happens? There was no [sense of], like, Freddy Pfennig being alive. Because again, it’s not a show that necessarily suggests what the premise is going to be. So just simply the dramatics of it: what this cat and mouse thing looks like. Or the idea of what does Nile do? The idea of Jarvis Yards and all those things. What was so challenging, but also exciting, was that it threatened to be this static premise. You could have an author and a subject, just these two people talking, which is kind of inert. So the question was really finding the drama inside a psychologically interesting and compelling idea, but a dramatically challenging one.
It was really about finding some of the creative work that gets done, like, wait, who is his father? Who is this guy? Really just rolling up your sleeves and figuring out who are all these people? And I don’t think those things had been thought through. That’s what comes with the experience of having taken a show and run it. The challenge, when people find themselves trying to develop it who don’t have the experience, sometimes it just, particularly for something that doesn’t suggest itself.
AF: It sounds like filming began before the entire story was locked. Was the ending of the series complete when you started shooting?
Gordon: That’s not entirely true. We had some ideas, but it certainly wasn’t written. But by then, I kind of knew. I knew that the architecture that I proposed was really the idea that it was going to ebb and flow in terms of her own credulity about this. I knew that at some point midstream, we, the audience, would know that he was [the killer].
I always say, going back to “X-Files,” if we found out there were no aliens, or if we found out that Sergeant Brody [in “Homeland”] was not a terrorist. Those are kind of basic contracts where I don’t think the question of whether he is or isn’t is what’s interesting. It’s getting there. But at some point, yes, we had to know that there were aliens out there, or otherwise it would be kind of a big, we call it schmuck bait. You’re really dangling the audience in a place that doesn’t feel very satisfying.
So you kind of know that something is up with this guy. If it wasn’t, it would kind of be oddly inert when you really think about how that would work. But getting there is what hopefully is the interesting journey. But I knew for Aggie, I knew that we’d ebb and flow with her own. Because it’s sort of like the old, “just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me.” So how do you take a woman who really has these genuine issues that she’s struggling with about narrative, that she’s really in a state of psychic breakdown. And then she is just paranoid. She is taking this grievance toward Freddy Pfennig. And so she’s one who’s inclined in some ways to doubt. Once she sort of recognizes, “Wait, maybe I did make this whole thing up.” But then a very, very fun thing about that premise is when somebody thinks, “Oh my God, maybe I did make this up,” but they didn’t. And then how do you extend it to the end?
AF: Let’s discuss casting. Beyond Claire Danes, what was the process for bringing on Matthew Rhys and Brittany Snow?
Gordon: With Matthew, it’s funny because it did remind me a little bit of the Brody casting. Writing a sociopath is a tricky voice to find. I think that character needed real excavation. Everyone can write a mustachioed character who talks in platitudes, but finding a real voice that really makes him at once charming, compelling, but also dangerous, but also vulnerable. I think the text was very hard to find, and the voice was hard to find. Matthew took it and just raised it to a level none of us expected. So we all were just utterly thrilled. Surprise makes it sound like, “Oh, I didn’t think he was that good an actor.” It wasn’t that. It was alchemy. It’s like that thing that you just don’t quite know until you know it.
AF: Brittany Snow blew me away in the show. Her character, Nina, in some ways, also has the beast in her.
Gordon: As a character, this is where we didn’t have any early iterations of the level of her complicity: conscious, mixed, and animating the things. What’s her relationship to children and where? And how does she come into the picture? And then making her Madison’s assistant and then having that aspiration. Those are the kinds of things you build. But those weren’t. So she was kind of flying blind because early on, her character is pretty thinly [developed]. She evolved, and I think there was a lot of faith in both in our casting, but in her acceptance of our casting.
AF: Once you saw her performance, did that expand her role beyond the original conception?
Gordon: I’ll go back to even when she read. So she was on tape, or whatever they call it now, she auditioned. There was something about her reading that just all of us, Antonio Campos and Daniel and Gabe, we all sat up and go, “Wow, she’s bringing something here.” So it was really her reading, to her credit, and that really got her the part. Who knows what. That was the point. No one knows. Yes. And also, you always have to let the story kind of find itself, or you have to be open to it. So you don’t always have all the answers, but I think you have to be open to where the story is taking you and answer questions that you’re asking.
AF: Regarding the length, how did you decide the story needed eight episodes, and was there ever a chance it could have continued?
Gordon: It’s so funny you say that. It is so interesting. It’s like a haiku or whatever, or 14 lines in iambic pentameter. It’s a weird kind of intuition. Could it be six, could it have been ten? Possibly. I do think this is one of the challenges of any show, particularly a serialized one. Of course, if it’s a doctor show or a lawyer show, if it’s anthological, you can always add another story. In this case, you really have to kind of guesstimate. “24” was a perfect example of the first time I really delved into serialized storytelling. And when you really look at it, a story is going to be told in 24 hours. That’s nuts. I mean, that’s really pure folly.
You do have to be careful, though, to not over bloat. I find myself kind of held hostage by a lot of series and I’m like, man, this could have been done in six episodes so why was this ten? So I was very mindful of it. But at the same time, I think we filled it out nicely. But again, sometimes I read negative criticism, which I try to avoid. I try to avoid the good and the bad, because then if you believe the good, you have to believe the bad. And fortunately, it’s been mostly good. But then some people say it could have been done shorter. So you have to ultimately trust your own gut, and it’s like an interior kind of rhythm. I don’t know, you’re like a bandleader and go like, what is the amount of pace? And you feel your way through these things.
AF: If you had two more episodes, what stories do you think you would have told within this narrative?
Gordon: I’m happy to report or to answer that I think it felt just right. And the experiment for us was the digression episode, which goes to your initial thing about you have a static premise basically in the present, but you have a past murder that you’re bringing the past into the present. So that flashback episode turned out to be a great way for us to sort of catch the audience up to a lot of the stuff that, until then, had been talked about largely by the characters, but not really dramatized. And so, I think it was, you really got to take chances sometimes. And I like to think we took some shots and hopefully they landed.
AF: Tension is crucial among almost all the characters. Is there anything you do from a direction or script standpoint to maintain that tension among the actors?
Gordon: Well, it is kind of a weird. I call it like the 360 of these people. You have to kind of know every character: where they came from. Was Brittany’s character from a modest family? What’s her relationship to money, to wealth? Those are questions that are asked and answered dramatically, but there’s so much more that you have to know about these characters as a writer. Whether you answer them or express them or dramatize them, they inform everything.
I always call the writing process just a series of questions that are asked and answered. What is something that’s interesting to you? And then, like, why did Aggie buy a house in that area if she was living in a walk up in Brooklyn as a modest earning writer? What happened with this best-seller? Why did she move there? And then you go, well, she’s from… So you really start connecting the dots. And maybe it’s self-evident to people, but I don’t think it is so self-evident. But you realize what are the tensions that are baked into character. I would say character is destiny. People’s characters really do dictate why they’re where they are and how they’re going to react.
AF: The people who complain about the pace probably don’t appreciate a scene like the first lunch between Claire and Matthew.
Gordon: That reminded me of what I was going to say. Thank you. I was going to say that sometimes when you mentioned pace, and it’s very hard to make people understand that sometimes you have to slow down to speed up, and I don’t know how else to say it. But it is a common and reflexive thing from networks, from studios, from everyone, to go, “Can it be shorter? Can you cut it? Can you make it go faster?” And it’s hard to take things like rhythm and pace and talk about them. So to answer your question, I think that’s exactly right. I think people didn’t watch it or give it the time that it we all were about trusting the audience to want a full-bodied experience, one that really they couldn’t text while they’re watching, that they would be compelled to put their phones down or their fork down, whatever they were doing, and really pay attention to a story that hopefully brought them in.
AF: Of that lunch scene, it’s electric. How much of that was scripted versus improv?
Gordon: No, it was very carefully written. It was a perfect. And again, I have to give it to Daniel [Pearle]. It was because he’s a playwright, and I mention it because he’s really not afraid to use language and afraid to sort of take his time and the digressions and all of it was very carefully scripted. So the actors took the text and they brought it here. Antonio took the text and brought it here. And we had our first and only kind of fight when I cut it a little bit short, but I cut some of it out. But again, this is where the beauty, to me, the pleasure of the creative process is in the back and forth. I’m so proud of that scene for that very reason that we took our time. And I think in its own way, that was a brave kind of thing to do.
AF: It definitely pays off. Well, congratulations on another hit. It was a pleasure to talk to you.
Gordon: Thank you, thank you.