Sexy Beasts is a sobering reminder of just how out-of-touch major production companies have gotten. From the way these ungodly images are presented, you can glean that nobody on staff thought to ask: "Wait, isn't this 'fun game show' starting to resemble the kind of nightmarish furry sh-t people on Twitter will put the Annihilation soundtrack over?" Even if someone did raise this question, they are no longer working in TV or streaming.
This show also plays like the sort of thing you'd see in a cynical parody. I know I say this about almost everything that gets made in mainstream entertainment today, but this one specifically feels like a rejected gag from one of the Interdimensional Cable episodes of Rick and Morty.
Indeed, I could totally see myself joking about a reality show of this caliber back in 2010 (the height of the popularity of Jersey Shore at my school and the year I truly understood the gravity of how stupid we've gotten) where instead of "Big Brother-Tyler" or "Paradise Hotel-Steve" or whatever, my schoolmates would speculate about the future of such figures as James the Beaver, Ibrahim the Wolf, and Nina the Dolphin. Fitting the bill, Sexy Beasts is basically First Dates as mixed with a Guillermo del Toro film (though a Del Toro film would better understand what sort of tone is best suited for these monstrosities, yet also have far nicer themes about monstrosity - and love).
In the show, people are put in admittedly decent monster makeup and sent on blind dates with other masked persons. The show aims to test whether we've moved past our primal shallowness and can fall in love with each other based on personality - if the contestants do, they're usually rewarded with the revelation that the TV personality they fell for was really conventionally attractive the whole time. (This is classic Beauty and the Beast, but I'm also reminded of that one Ctrl+Alt+Del comic where a woman pretends to be fat in order to "test" her date and the "happy ending" reveals that she was thin all along, ergo our poor, poor protagonist doesn't actually need to suffer the ordeal of loving an "ugly" human being.)
The final product is unacceptably boring, given the sort of visuals we're treated to, and hardly very romantic. Perhaps if we'd seen more of each beastly pairing, but I guess even the showrunners realize that there's only so much time we can reasonably devote to bland hotties going on dates - Pan's Labyrinth-style grotesqueries or not.
Despite its unintentional eeriness and kinda dumb concept, however, Sexy Beasts is, at the end of the day, nowhere near the most rancid thing reality TV has given us - in fact, it's damn near impossible to top the bottoms in this particular genre (Honey Boo Boo, Born in the Wild, et al.). Yes, it plays like someone hurled darts at a dartboard filled with random words and ideas in order to find something even remotely original to add to the world of reality television, but the fact that there was an attempt puts it above most of its genre peers.
Some of my friends who watch reality shows, to their credit, don't do it because they sincerely idolize or care about the dating lives of Holothurian-brained TV celebs, but because they think of it as going to the zoo (made more literal by shows like Sexy Beasts, I guess) and studying the behaviors of our most brainless specimens. However, I think there is another level of curiosity to this experiment:
Think of the fact that there exists a reality show (a full-blown franchise, even) called Big Brother, its title most surely a reference to George Orwell's 1984, wherein impossible-to-deactivate "telescreens" existed in every household to feed the citizens information. Think of the fact that people not only started purchasing such devices on purpose (including pocket-sized ones that seem able to monitor the user, not unlike Orwell's vision of the TV) but also began accepting whatever braindead tripe rises to popularity because it's being aired on Fridays and everyone else at school is talking about it - even when its title (accidentally or not) evokes a dystopia of groupthink and TV mind-control.
This, to me, says more about the human race than watching some of its members behave in such-and-such way when pitted against other conventionally attractive sponge-brains in projects like Paradise Hotel, Ex on the Beach, Love Island, Paradise Beach, Love Hotel, Ex on the Island, Beach Island Hotel, Big Brother Uganda, or whatever else we've all agreed to consume. And keep this in mind, before you leave this post thinking I'm some pretentious know-it-all (which I am) who's totally above it all (which I'm not): "We're all puppets, I'm just a puppet who can see the strings".
