Summary
Beauty in Black is somehow even worse in Season 2, revelling in the same dysfunction but shunting its aside its protagonist to make room for it.
You have to laugh, don’t you? Ordinarily, Netflix reserves its silly two-part strategy for only its biggest IPs, like when it released half of Wednesday Season 2 and then the rest of it a few weeks later. Are we to believe, then, that Tyler Perry’s Beauty in Black constitutes this kind of service-defining, can’t-miss show? I’m sceptical, personally, since Beauty in Black is dreadful, but Season 2 is releasing in two parts, each comprising eight episodes, so maybe I’m the outlier here.
If you don’t remember this show – and, frankly, who can blame you – it was the one about the stripper facing off against the haircare mogul for membership in an absurdly wealthy family. It ended, eventually, with a pretty major cliffhanger in which Kimmie, the stripper, married the Bellarie family patriarch, Horace (Ricco Ross, P-Valley), at his hospital bedside to prevent his God-awful sons from claiming his inheritance. And that’s where we pick things up.
Needless to say, the status quo has shifted somewhat. Now Kimmie (Taylor Polidore Williams, Divorce in the Black) is the head of the family, and is promoted to a life of absurd luxury alongside her sister, Sylvie (Bailey Tippen), and her stripper friend Rain (Amber Reign Smith). Naturally, her appointment is a supreme inconvenience to everyone else, especially Mallory (Crystle Stewart, Acrimony), her husband Roy (Julian Horton), and Horace’s ex-wife, Olivia (Debbi Morgan).
Legacy subplots from Season 1 continue to percolate in the margins. Angel (Xavier Smalls, Madea’s Destination Wedding) has been arrested for a carjacking that is complicated for reasons I can’t be bothered to explain, the wayward party-hard Bellarie boy Charles (Steven G. Norfleet) is still in a secret relationship with the family attorney, Varney (Terrell Carter), and word of what Jules (Charles Malik Whitfield) and Norman (Richard Lawson) were really doing at Delinda’s quickly becomes public knowledge, leading to some dangerous cover-up efforts.
And it’s all, you’ll be unsurprised to hear, still rubbish. The acting and writing are woefully half-hearted, with dialogue that has to be heard to be believed, and the ridiculous turns of the plot sometimes seem sprung to life as dares rather than serious developments. The selling point conflict of the first season – namely, Mallory’s personal rivalry with Kimmie, bundled up as it was with all kinds of tertiary notions about class – is almost non-existent here, since Kimmie is an enemy of the entire family and Mallory is, by comparison, one of the sanest, least dangerous among them.
Kimmie herself doesn’t even have a great deal to do. For at least half of Part 1, she lounges around in her huge new house, goes shopping, and visits the bank, all while the drama happens to other characters. Those ideas about her strutting around as Beauty in Black CEO amount to nothing, as she’s mostly on the equivalent of house arrest, trying to pluck up the courage to crowbar her way back into the soapier elements of the plot.
That plot remains ridiculous, a situation worsened by the fact that there isn’t a single likeable, redeemable character in the whole show. All anyone cares about is money and power, and the most genuine-feeling relationship – the one between Varney and Charles – is cheapened by Perry’s try-hard efforts to create a cartoonishly hostile environment around the idea of a homosexual relationship. In 2025, it’s really no wonder Charles acts out the way that he does when he’s treated with open disdain by his entire family simply for his nature.
Within all this, Kimmie remains less interesting than everyone, especially in Season 2. Beauty in Black is ostensibly her story, but she feels like she’s barely hanging on to it, having become a catalyst for the Bellarie clan’s internal dysfunction at the expense of her own agency. Improbably, the show is less interesting now than it was before, which is quite an achievement given it was execrable in the first place.
One can only imagine that Tyler Perry is simply the Horace-style patriarch figure in Netflix boardrooms, only ever a call away from getting what he wants, even if nobody else wants it. But who am I kidding? Based on the first season’s popularity, plenty of people wanted more of Beauty in Black, though the reasons why anyone would remain totally mysterious to me.
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