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.
