The journalist and the jinx in a suburban standoff

CLAIRE DANES GETS A LOT OF ATTENTION for her “cry face.” It is, indeed, a sight to behold. Engulfed by waves of sorrow, her chin vibrates, her eyes scrunch, the corners of her mouth turn down as though tugged by invisible weights.

- BY JUDY BERMAN

But the crying is just an extreme expression of Danes’ greatest asset: her ability to convey abjection. This quality shaped her performances in roles as different as My So-Called Life’s angsty teen Angela Chase and the doomed female lead in Romeo + Juliet, the bipolar CIA agent in Homeland and the Manhattan supermom of Fleishman Is in Trouble. Even surrounded by misfit buddies or concerned colleagues, her characters feel wholly, miserably—but also, somehow, relatably—alone.

Loneliness happens to be the defining attribute of Danes’ latest antihero, Aggie Wiggs, the Pulitzer-winning journalist at the center of the Netflix cat-and-mouse thriller The Beast in Me. Still racked with grief years after her young son’s death in a car crash, divorced from the wife with whom she was raising him, and paralyzed by writer’s block, Aggie can’t let go of pain for which she blames everyone but herself. She is the best character Danes (also an executive producer) has given us since Homeland’s Carrie Mathison. And the ideally cast, impeccably paced, diabolically addictive eight-episode murder mystery that she anchors is one of the year’s most suspenseful rides.