Listen, I may love game shows but ones about dating don’t interest me at all. I honestly don’t get the point of them as at best it's exploitation, an act put on to create a false sense of romance. Nobody falls in love as quickly as these shows make out. They’re artificial, concocting scenarios that only seek to make person-to-person contact more perverse. Also, the principle that these dating shows have long-term guarantees makes no sense. As someone whose parents are separated, who lives in a country with a high divorce rate, it doesn’t make sense for networks to suggest that they’re the ultimate matchmakers. What is this futile entertainment? I get no pleasure in watching the most glorified round of speed dating imaginable.
Which really makes you have to ask: why am I watching Sexy Beasts: the latest dating show from Netflix? In the grand scheme of things, it’s only the second of its kind that I’ve watched after Love on the Spectrum – and I only watched that to see how it depicted autistic individuals. Even with that deeper bond, I never finished that show and have no intention to get through Sexy Beasts. From what I gather, most people are in the same boat. Netflix most infamously released the trailer to universal befuddlement. Many falsely equated it to some messed up furry fantasy while others, more accurately, suggested that the show about how looks aren’t everything was going to be full of ridiculously good looking people.
I didn’t think about watching it until I came across a random article promoting it. Once I realized it wasn’t adapted from the Jonathan Glazer movie, it was an uphill battle to capture my interest, and I almost got away unscathed.
What did me in? What caused me to not only want to peruse it but write roughly 2000 words about a show that is going to exist in the annals of bad TV?
To be completely honest, I am as much drawn to the macabre as it is the idea of exploring it from a very specific standpoint. I am demisexual. In short, it means that I only feel sexual attraction to people I have a close bond with. The more that I’ve understood that about myself, the more hollow I’ve found dating shows, and am confused why people obsess over the weirdest things. What is with this courting process of men being over-compensating with masculinity while doing Tex Avery eyes when the girl has big boobs? Why are they so quick to want to kiss and feel comfortable with someone you’ve known less than an afternoon? This is all insane. I get being friends, but dating feels like it should be more rigorous, trial and error. I’m not saying that people in long-term relationships aren’t capable of changing their minds, but the rate with which TV suggests “love” (mistaken for sexual attraction usually) kicks in is completely nonsensical.
With this in mind, Sexy Beasts actually sounded like a cool premise. In the back of my head, I knew this was going to be a conventional mess, but I wanted to believe that I was about to see something that felt inherently demisexual. If I’ve had trouble tracking down asexual representation, this subcategory was much tougher. In fact, the only real representation I’ve found to date was a one-off joke from Netflix’s Why Are You Like This? where the bisexual protagonist was annoyed that a random guy didn’t want to hook up immediately.
So the premise excited me. The catch is that a person goes on dates with three individuals. The catch is that each of the four people are wearing “beast” masks which range from conventional animals to zombies. The dates are driven by conversations, desiring individuals to share things about their personalities that would hopefully make them connect on an instinctual level. It isn’t until each person is eliminated that everyone is revealed and the central dater determines if they made a good decision, a.k.a. if the person actually looks nice.
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| Stud muffin |
Okay, that last part is disappointing but what show geared at allosexuals doesn’t want to sell amatanormativity? That is TV’s goal, to promote escapism where everything works out. As the episodes roll, the audience doesn’t really know if these two end up happily ever after. There’s the suggestion that they will as they allude to marriage and the long-term, but it feels like a nauseating way to live life. Given that I’ve only seen two episodes with no intent to move forward, I partially wonder if there will be a “Where are they now?” episode in a few years that tells us what these people did when the cameras were off. Again, I don’t care as everyone just feels so damn shallow.
In some respects, the biggest issue is that these episodes average 24 minutes. It helps convince me that Sexy Beasts is not just secretly some [adult swim] joke meant to screw over innocent people. There’s definitely something comic and absurd about the scenario down to the Rob Delaney narration, but what is the bigger point? It feels like a Tim and Eric-style deflation to get to the end of the episode and realize that everyone is hot because, quite honestly, things move so fast that I don’t get any sense of who these people are. It isn’t just the masks. It’s genuinely that they shroud these people enough in mystery that they fail to resonate or make for rootable protagonists.
But let’s step back for a minute. I want to answer the question as to whether this show has a way to work or not? To be completely honest, the whole idea of hidden identity and love is a very old concept. Think of masquerades or A Cinderella Story (2004). There is something titillating about mystery. Humans are driven to solve the puzzle, and having a facial roadblock only adds to the show’s curiosity. The bigger matter is that there isn’t anything they do that makes for riveting TV. The questions they ask aren’t particularly exciting or telling. It’s generic dating show tropes where an ice sculpting class devolves into a joke about how the woman split hers in half and thus had a metaphorical “broken heart.”
As a demisexual, I want to believe that there’s a way that this premise works outside of a self-consciousness, cynical read that is clearly premise-first. With that said, I have to give the make-up artists credit for making masks that may be at times jarring but are complementary to the show’s point. While the voice and mannerisms gave away ideas of what the person could look like, they helped to take attention off of looks. It allowed everyone to be awkward and vulnerable. It’s just a shame that the people underneath are so clearly driven by heteronormative horniness that looks were still constantly on people’s minds.
Before stepping forward, I want to specify that this doesn’t strike me as the furry nightmare that some might’ve feared. While I know very little about the community, my understanding is that it’s more than a fetish, serving more as an identity like one is an accountant. They find some connection to animals that is sincere and genuine. As far as I can tell, nobody here finds genuine passion when wearing these masks. There’s no extension of the self. They all accept it as weird and are mostly impatiently waiting to take it off and comment how the person they’ve been talking to was secretly this seductive Latina.
What have I gotten from these individuals that is valuable to my time? Very little. I get more empathy and character development from a 30-second interview with contestants on Jeopardy! than I do here.
Because honestly, nobody seems invested in the premise outside of Delaney. In episode two, the central dater makes it very clear how much he favors a woman with a nice butt. He constantly alludes to their figures. Everyone is talking about parts of the body that can be seen. He even goes so far as to critique how beautiful he finds each woman as he’s deciding who is coming back for a second date. Given that the first episode includes a date where one of the subjects discusses being a boob man and asking if the central dater has ever had public sex only shows the type of people who would go on this show. Everyone is clearly mugging for the camera and so obsessed with looks. Each time a person is revealed, they can’t help but talk about how hot they are.
I understand that there is a bit of a loophole to this show in theory. Notice how I’m emphasizing the attractiveness of everyone, that “looks aren’t everything” despite everyone being validated at the end for being sexy. It’s true that if the mask was pulled off and a person was deemed ugly, it may create this bullying subtext for the series. Even then, for a show that’s asking everyone to celebrate personality, it’s doing a bad job of making the consolation prize dating a marginally less attractive individual. Everyone here looks Calvin Klein-ready and twice as milquetoast. Since we don’t know much about them anyway, the ultimate prize comes across as a manic depressive foghorn.
There is no purpose to this show that qualifies as suspenseful. Sure, it is fun to try and guess what these people look like and admire the craftsmanship of the masks, but this is at best going to be mocked as a fever dream. It cannot commit even to its own premise. I’ve heard it compared to The Dating Game, and I’d argue even that show does more with less effort. Given that these shows are supposed to build empathy for the common man wanting love, I especially leave the second episode feeling sorry for the woman who wound up with a certified dweeb with a very uninspired view of love. But hey, she looks nice.
I’m not here to criticize the attractiveness of any person involved with this show. In my opinion, they all pass for people who could land a partner easily. What I’m more invested in is seeing if this show truly invests in the idea that personality is more important. Maybe in the four remaining episodes, I will find my knight in demi armor, but I doubt it. None of these people feel driven by the things that I want in the show. I don’t care to hear people talk about how sexy someone’s butt is. I want to know what they do with their lives that would make them compatible. Even then, this show moves so fast literally (24 minutes makes the whole thing feel like it’s at 2x speed) and figuratively (who can you really know that intimately after only three encounters?). There is no development, just a clear deadline.
Again, I hate dating shows on the fact that I don’t care about strangers in that way. I’m not a fan of gossip and drama as entertainment. Maybe this is more tolerable in that it’s doing something that is halfway appealing, but it still doesn’t feel like it wants to be about what it says. I suppose I should’ve figured that out with a name like Sexy Beasts, but all I get is a reminder that what people want out of courtship is much different – at least from a network standpoint. This is more designed to be gawked at, and I don’t find that fun. It feels cruel and misleading. More than anything, it equates sex too much with romance and that in itself goes against the idea that looks aren’t everything.
I’m sure someone will like this with more eclectic tastes. If you get the right beer and pop off the cap, the many egregious errors will seem less problematic. Then again, watching a show where nobody’s having fun with the concept, getting lost in a moment in ways that make for good TV, just makes it all depressing. This isn’t just a waste of four people’s lives trying to find love in a warped social understanding of it. It’s a waste for genuinely talented artists who made some great art that feels disposable. Nobody is going to end up happy, save maybe the one couple on this who does go on to have a family and has to tell their child that they met as a beaver and a zombie or something. At least they’ll get to have a chuckle.
Even then, I await the day when a real demisexual story about love is released by someone as reputable as Netflix. If anything, it will be more attention grabbing than another show about horny people wanting to hump the night away. You go enjoy that. Without any understanding of who these people are, I have no reason to care what they do with their time. I hope they got paid at least.
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