Beauty in Black is a new Netflix series whose main reason for being is to drive subscriptions. All eight of its hour-long episodes were written, produced and directed by Tyler Perry – a billionaire who measures the success of his streaming films and TV shows by that score.
On paper Beauty in Black is the story of two women “leading very different lives”. Kimmie (Taylor Polidore Williams) is the gold-hearted sex worker with dreams of making a legitimate turn into cosmetology. Mallory (Crystle Stewart) is the face of a beauty empire that also happens to oversee the dark underworld to which Kimmie is bound. On screen, the series is proudly obscene and deliberately pornographic – the first Perry series to earn a TV-MA rating. Ten minutes into the pilot we’re dropped inside a strip club. Perry pushes in on the women as they jiggle their bare breasts and bums and the men as they leave the backs of their skivvies dangling. Not long thereafter, we see Kimmie’s bestie (Amber Reign Smith) nearly die from a botched butt-lift. A few scenes later, we see Kimmie get raped by a VIP client – Mallory’s husband. The episode ends with a jogger being run over. Madea’s Family Reunion, this is not.
You’d have to be blind not to see the play here. Over the past decade, Tubi, a free streaming service, has emerged as a digital media powerhouse by serving Black audiences rough-cut gems like The Dirty D, a scattershot series that centers on a Detroit strip club, or The Rapper Who Got Shot in the Heel, a sendup of the Megan Thee Stallion-Tory Lanez incident. These amateur auteurs operate totally outside the Hollywood system, funding their passion projects with their own money while churning out work that ranges from so-bad-it’s-good to hold up these people are actually trying to do something here. It was only a matter of time before Perry came round to steal their lunch.
But where those Tubi projects provide audience members at least one character to invest in if not root for, Beauty in Black can’t make the same offer. Kimmie, we’re repeatedly told, is dumb and terrible at her job – and, to be honest, she doesn’t help to push back against this criticism at first. Given the logline, you’d expect to see glimpses of the fighter who eventually turns the tables. Instead, we get that detail secondhand from her bestie as she’s lying in the hospital with her botched op. Everyone in this world is objectively mean and terrible; even Mallory is a bitch on wheels, extreme even for a typically one-dimensional Perry character. But what makes these characters especially evil is how they spend hours stretching setups that either don’t deliver the promised payoff or get dropped all together. They talk and talk, these characters.
In one scene, one character argues with another about how to properly adjust his smartphone settings. In another, Kimmie’s boss (Charles Malik Whitfield) – who somehow has time to oversee the security for Mallory’s family business while also operating a strip club – tries to run over and kill Kimmie with his Range Rover, and blows his stack when the car’s safety nannies intervene. It might’ve been funny if the Top Gear team hadn’t thought of it first. The one thing Beauty in the Black does have going for it is its high production values. Some locations are so gorgeous in their pastoral splendor, you could almost forget this was supposed to be a show set in Chicago.
Over the years, Perry has gone out of his way to credit the Christian audiences for supporting him from his early church plays through his current on-screen work. But there’s a good chance he loses some of the flock here. That’s not saying that he shouldn’t bother demonstrating his range. (George Miller directed the Mad Max trilogy and Happy Feet. Spike Lee shoots commercials.) Or that Beauty in Black’s mature content stands out among Netflix’s racy fare. It’s just weird for the guy who made church grannies giggle to be exploring his freaky side – especially as Hollywood reckons with a raft of sexual abuse cases that have sprung from its lascivious culture.
They say write what you know. In Beauty in the Black, Perry shows that he would literally make anything to make a buck. Madea’s kinky era can’t be far behind.
Beauty in Black is now available on Netflix
