'Beauty in Black' Review – Tyler Perry's Netflix Series Is Another Garish Mess | US television

bBeauty in Black is a new Netflix series whose main purpose is to increase subscriptions. All eight one-hour episodes were written, produced and directed by Tyler Perry – a billionaire who measures the success of his streaming films and TV shows.

On paper, Beauty in Black is the story of two women who “lead very different lives.” Kimmie (Taylor Polidore Williams) is the kind-hearted sex worker who dreams of entering the beauty industry. Mallory (Crystle Stewart) is the face of a beauty empire that also happens to oversee the dark underworld that Kimmie is connected to. On screen, the series is proudly obscene and deliberately pornographic – the first Perry series to receive a TV-MA rating. Ten minutes into the pilot episode, we are dropped off at a strip club. Perry presses on the women as they jiggle their bare breasts and butts, and on the men as they dangle the backs of their underwear. Not long after, we see Kimmie's best friend (Amber Reign Smith) almost die from a botched butt lift. A few scenes later, we see Kimmie being raped by a VIP customer – Mallory's husband. The episode ends with a jogger getting run over. This is not Madea's family reunion.

You would have to be blind not to see the piece here. Over the last decade, Tubi, a free streaming service, has become a digital media powerhouse by bringing black audiences raw gems like The Dirty D, a scattershot series centered around a Detroit strip club, or The Rapper Who Got Shot in presents the Heel, a reference to the incident between Megan Thee Stallion and Tory Lanez. These amateur writers operate completely outside the Hollywood system, funding their passion projects with their own money while producing work that ranges from so bad it's good Wait a minute, these people are actually trying to do something here. It was only a matter of time before Perry came along to steal their lunch.

But while those Tubi projects at least give viewers a character to invest in, if not excite, them, Beauty in Black can't make the same offer. Kimmie, we're constantly told, is stupid and terrible at her job – and to be honest, defending herself against this criticism doesn't help her at first. Given the logline, one would expect to see glimpses of the fighter who eventually turns the tables. Instead, we learn this detail secondhand from her best friend, who is in the hospital with her botched surgery. 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 particularly evil is the way they spend hours stretching out setups that either fail to deliver as promised or are dropped altogether. They talk and talk, these characters.

In one scene, one character argues with another about how to properly adjust the settings on his smartphone. In another case, Kimmie's boss (Charles Malik Whitfield), who somehow has time to oversee the security of Mallory's family business while also running a strip club, attempts to run over and kill Kimmie with his Range Rover, blowing up his stack as that Car is no longer safe. Nannies intervene. It might have been funny if the Top Gear team hadn't thought of it first. The one thing that sets “Beauty in the Black” apart is the high production values. Some places are so beautiful in their pastoral splendor that you could almost forget that this was supposed to be a show Chicago.

Over the years, Perry has done his best to give credit to Christian audiences for supporting him from his early church plays to his current work on the screen. But there's a good chance he'll lose some of the herd here. That doesn't mean he shouldn't make the effort to demonstrate his range. (George Miller directed the Mad Max trilogy And Happy feet. Spike Lee makes commercials.) Or that the adult content of “Beauty in Black” stands out from the racy Netflix series. It's just strange that the guy who made church grandmas laugh is exploring his crazy side – especially as Hollywood reckons with a series of sexual abuse cases stemming from his lascivious culture.

They say: write what you know. In Beauty in the Black, Perry shows he could do it in every sense of the word anything Earn money. Madea's naughty era can't wait much longer.