Beauty In Black is the first series that Tyler Perry has created under his deal with Netflix after a handful of feature films. Series that Perry writes, directs and produces aren’t exactly known for their subtle dialogue or nuanced themes, but perhaps a series about two women’s very different lives intersecting will change that.
Opening Shot: A woman walks down the hall of a well-appointed house.
The Gist: The “who, what, where, when, why?” of the pilot.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Kimmie (Taylor Polidore Williams) is a sex worker who is in the home of a very wealthy and influential client, but that client, Calvin (Shannon Wallace) berates and threatens her for not looking “classy” enough.
Kimmie and her friend Rain (Amber Reign Smith) were forced into sex work, working for a pimp named Jules (Charles Malik Whitfield), after being caught with drugs at the airport. Calvin is so powerful in Chicago that he can send both of them back to jail with one phone call.
They also dance at a strip club, which is which is also part of the sex work operation. Before going into work one night, Kimmie takes Rain to a hotel where Mallory Bellaire (Crystle Stewart), CEO of the Beauty In Black hair product company, is giving away scholarships to her beauty school and a $1 million award to a selected salon. Kimmie has applied for a scholarship, hoping it’s her way out of the endless cycle of working for Jules. Rain thinks this is a pipe dream, saying “At some point, you gotta face the fact that we hos. That’s all we gonna be.”
Mallory came from humble beginnings; she tells the audience that a foster mother took her to a model search, where she was discovered by the Bellaire family. She ended up marrying into it, but wanted to use their money to start the hair care business that’s now a massive success.
Kimmie is late to the club, where she’s dressed down by Delinda (Ursula O. Robinson), who’s in charge of the girls, and Body (Tamera “Tee” Kissen), a stripper who is Delinda’s feel collector and enforcer. She’s sent into the VIP room, where she immediately offends the wealthy customer (Rico Ross) when she notices he’s looking at a male stripper outside the curtain.
After the speaking engagement, Mallory gets served with a lawsuit about her company’s hair relaxer causing cancer. As soon as she gets in her SUV, her manner flips, and she berates her security, insults her assistant, and complains that the woman who won the $1 million will likely spend the money on crack. She kicks her staffers out of the SUV and drives herself home. On the way home, she hits someone in a driving rain and eventually drives away.
In the meantime, Body arranges for Rain to get butt implants, in a procedure done right in the motel room where she and Kimmie live. They’ve been friends since Kimmie was kicked out of her house at 17, her mother thinking that she is too tempting a target for the man who lives with them; Rain met her in the bathroom of a Walmart, where Kimmie was hiding out.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Tyler Perry’s Beauty In Black reminds us of the South African series Savage Beauty.
Our Take: Perry wrote and directed Beauty In Black, and the proceedings are pretty grim, while also being entirely predictable. Kimmie and Rain are stuck in a cycle where they will perpetually owe Jules money, so he’ll be able to traffic them out for sex work as long as he can. And while Kimmie seems to have ambitions outside of what she’s doing now, she’s so far in debt to people like Jules and Calvin there seems to be no way out.
And all the time we were seeing Mallory being kind and magnanimous to the crowd gathered at her speaking engagement, we knew that as soon as she was behind closed doors, she’d flip to being just as much an abusive, coarse figure as Jules, Calvin, and it seems everyone at the strip club is. We’ve never heard the words “bitch” and “money” as many times in the span of 43 minutes as we heard in the first episode of this show, and we’ve reviewed shows like P-Valley, which revolve around strip clubs and sex work.
There seems to be very little subtlety or nuance to this story, at least in the first episode. There’s some nuance in Williams’ performance as Kimmie, especially in a scene where Kimmie can barely hold back tears as she returns to Calvin’s house for another go at pleasing him. But most of Kimmie’s facial expressions just make her look like she’s miserable. Everyone else essentially yells their parts, because almost every line is about someone verbally abusing someone else.
Look, we get it; this is Perry’s idea of what this world is about. But we wonder if Perry was the right guy to write this kind of story. If the story were written by women, or perhaps not a media mogul who became a billionaire via Madea films and silly family sitcoms, there might be more subtlety to the story.
Sex and Skin: Lots of both.
Parting Shot: Predictably, the butt implants didn’t go well, and Kimmie finds Rain lying unconscious in their motel room, blood-stained cloths strewn everywhere.
Sleeper Star: As predictable as Mallory’s character is, we give Crystle Stewart credit for being able to turn on a dime and make the behind-the-scenes version of Mallory believable.
Most Pilot-y Line: There are lots of awkward lines, but what got to us most is that there is a completely different actress playing 17-year-old Kimmie in flashbacks, but the actress playing Rain is the same. This couldn’t have happened that long ago; why not just have Williams play young Kimmie?
Our Call: SKIP IT. Tyler Perry’s Beauty In Black is about a subtle as a slap in the face, which is something we’re surprised we didn’t see in the grim, abuse-filled first episode.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.