HOLLYWOOD—Talk about a guilty pleasure because whew, when you’re binging a TV series during the wee hours of the night, you know you are hooked America. I have been hearing so much about Tyler Perry’s new series “Beauty in Black” on Netflix. What can I say. Well, the acting is not great. I am sorry, I just have to call it as I see it. It’s not great, there are some actors and actresses that are just stiff in the dialogue delivery, and you can see it as a viewer.
Not to mention there are a few conversations in some of the episodes that make you say, “What is the purpose? Why is this conversation lasting so much longer than what it needs to last?” However, if you can look past those things the narrative itself is captivating to watch. I was enamored watching the dynamics play out between our two female anchors of the series Kimmie (Taylor Polidore Williams) and Mallory (Crystle Stewart).
Kimmie is a character that will absolutely break your heart. She has lived a very tough life, being abandoned by her mother at a teen, being forced to fend for herself and then finding herself working as a stripper and semi-prostitute for a corrupt detective. It seems no matter how many steps she takes to get ahead in her life, she gets knocked back down. She has a semi-friend in Rain, who learns the hard way just because someone tells you something doesn’t mean their word holds true.
I heard so many people saying there is not a single redeemable character in the entire series and I have to disagree with that assertion. Yes, around 95 percent of them are bad and very bad, but you have that slight two to three that have some sort of redeeming quality if they choose to do so. Kimmie wants to get out of the stripper life and go to cosmetic school to focus on hair and makeup. She idolizes Mallory, who heads the Beauty in Black hair empire. However, all is not as it seems with Mallory and her in-laws. Image means everything to her, and she ensures people understand that, to the point that she stays in a marriage with her husband, Roy (Julian Horton), who is all about drugs, sex and alcohol.
The same can be said for his brother, Charles, who indulges in the same things, but he just happens to be gay. Something that both his uncle Norman (Richard Lawson) and his father Horace (Ricco Ross) are not fans of. Then you have the matriarch of the family, Olivia (Debbi Morgan), who is quite religious, but she has a vindictive side if anyone threatens her family, especially her sons.
Yes, the Bellaire family and its empire are full of twisted and evil people. The interesting one is Horace who develops a relationship with Kimmie that could be her way out or it could lead to the ultimate downfall. As a viewer you are going to get invested in these characters after one episode, and with each episode, the chaos, the twists, the surprises get larger and larger to the point that you cannot believe what it is you’re watching.
Beyond salacious, utterly sexy, wickedly funny, brutally gut punching, Perry’s “Beauty in Black” is a good time, even though it’s not the best in the acting and dialogue realm at times. Part one of the series has dropped all its episodes on Netflix and the second part is expected to premiere sometime in 2025 on Netflix, and after all those cliffhangers the last episode gave us, I want answers, and I want them now!