Even with that colorful history, the coincidental appearance of so many fictional villains made me wonder: Why Nassau County? Why Long Island? Why now?
So I asked the writers who created them.
Carola Lovering, who wrote “Tell Me Lies,” wanted her protagonist, Lucy, to be from someplace like her hometown, Bedford, N.Y., a storied Westchester suburb, and friends from Long Island suggested the tonier Suffolk County to counter her antagonist Stephen’s Nassau roots. Freida McFadden, the best-selling novelist who wrote “The Housemaid” (once entirely pseudonymous, she recently revealed herself to be a doctor named Sarah Cohen), grew up in Manhattan, but felt Long Island was a natural setting for a suburban melodrama, like a “real-life version of Wisteria Lane,” she told me, citing the TV show “Desperate Housewives.” She hoped to invoke the kind of “suburban neighborhood where everyone knows everyone and they all have their own juicy secrets.”
It was Gabe Rotter, the TV writer behind “The Beast in Me” and himself a fellow Nassau native, who struck on what sounded to me like an essential truth. “You can’t overestimate what it means to grow up 30 miles from the most intense city on the earth and not be in it. You can feel that on Long Island,” he said. “You’re there but you’re not there.” He continued: “The proximity without belonging is kind of a very specific psychic wound that Nassau County inflicts on its people.”
Proximity without belonging — come to think of it, in my experience, that could be an ideal motto for Nassau County. As a kid growing up in Nassau, I felt my life was defined by these kinds of contradictions. My parents were Bronx-bred lefties living amid fiscally conservative, socially liberal Reagan Republicans. I lived in a modest house in a middle-class town but had school friends in nearby hamlets who resided in lavish mansions with indoor pools and Rolls-Royces parked out front. There was always a sort of nowhereness (or everywhereness?) to my life that made me feel as if I were lying no matter how I described my upbringing. Were we rich? Poor? City? Suburbs? Some in-between thing? I felt that I didn’t fit in anywhere. Looking back, I wonder if that was the most Nassau thing about me.
Proximity without belonging is also an apt description of a wider crisis that’s got the whole country in its grip — which might explain the mini-epidemic of fictional Long Island bad guys. Red states butt up against blue states, the 1 percent and the 99 percent share the same cities, yet we’re all struggling to figure out how to coexist. Mr. Rotter’s comment recalled something the journalist Anand Giridharadas said recently about Jeffrey Epstein, a Coney Island native who came of age “with a burning desire to have money, to be in the elite.” As Mr. Giridharadas explained, “This is an outer-borough thing. I think this emotion of the outer borough right near Manhattan, the desire to make it in Manhattan, has become one of the defining political forces of our age.” In other words: proximity without belonging.
