‘Sexy Beasts’ Proves That Dressing Up As A Sexy Nightmare Animal Is Not A Great Way To Find Love
'Sexy Beasts' is incredibly fun, and incredibly pointless.
If you’re in the mood for watching a dating show, but you also want the blissful sensation of having just hit yourself in the head with an extremely heavy brick, then Netflix’s bizarre new show Sexy Beasts is exactly the poison for you.
I’ve had fevers that have felt less intrusive and nightmarish — yet I watched every single episode of Sexy Beasts, and I would watch more if they were available. Please give me more.
Each episode is short, with the kind of velocity that makes you feel like you’re watching it at x3 speed. It needs to be that fast because while it’s chock-full of insanity — a visual feast being force-fed to you, an explosion of oddness — the format is relatively simple, and repetitive.
Basically, we are given a subject who is looking for love — someone with a name like Kariselle, who the show dresses up as a bird or a panda or a disgusting rotting zombie. The prosthetic masks are elaborate and distracting and the key component in what makes the show such a nightmarish kaleidoscope of an experience. Then, that person proceeds to go on a bunch of extremely short dates with three other people, who are ALSO intricately masked. For some reason most of them are American, but it’s set in London, and a lot of it takes place in the lush campness of an actual Downton Abbey style manor.
Honestly, each episode would probably only be about ten minutes long if they didn’t have so many scenes of all the contestants dancing seductively and winking and beckoning in their horrendous prosthetics. After we get a couple of quick scenes of these masked up weirdos throwing axes or trying to fit champagne glasses around fake beaver teeth, there’s a weird ceremony, someone is chosen, and then they all reveal what they really look like.
The reveal is the entire point of this show, and it’s always both incredibly fun, and incredibly pointless.
Can You Fall In Love With A Hot Woman Wearing A Disgusting Zombie Mask?
Sexy Beasts has a fairly ambitious goal for a dating show, asking as their official slogan: “Can you fall in love with someone based on personality alone?”
It’s an interesting question, bound up in dilemmas around the nature of defining physical beauty, and the witches brew of factors that dictate attraction, and the mysterious divine confection that is true love. Philosophers, scientists, and poets have spent their entire lives contemplating questions like this, and lucky for them, they can get straight back to it, because Sexy Beasts doesn’t even get anywhere close to figuring anything out.
Sexy Beasts asks the question of whether or not physical attraction is important, and then comprehensively answers “yes”. A lot of this is due to the fact that they only seem to cast young, conventionally attractive people, who basically say that they joined the show because “they want someone who loves me for me” and variations of the same phrase, like “I want something deeper”. What that basically translates to is “I’m simply too hot for dating”. Not a single person in any episode could be called anything less than blandly hot.
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS SHOW?!?! ITS CLALED SEXY BEASTS ON NETLFIX
FURRIES COME GET YOUR SHOW pic.twitter.com/wIkYbIv2oF
— marisa mendoza (@mem6mmm) July 28, 2021
Weirdly, by creating an entire formula around obscuring people’s physical attractiveness (somewhat — no owl mask in the world covers up the fact that all these young model types are extremely skinny and ripped), they actually place more importance on it all. Every episode has people basically holding their breath, hoping an ugly person doesn’t get revealed — and then get super excited when the person they’ve gone on one date with is confirmed as stock model hot.
Part of the joy of the show is watching the people who were rejected reveal themselves as hot, and make the person in charge doubt themselves. There are episodes where men have literally gotten emotional at how hot the person they rejected is. A woman cries.
Everyone is revealed as actually being exactly as shallow as they all fear. And after a while you realise…that’s the point. This show is a massive troll, an absurd statement about the shallowness of modern dating.
It’s An Entertaining Essay On Failure
Sexy Beasts, in a supposed attempt to move away from shallowness, manages to make a reality dating show that manages to be more shallow than ever before. It’s an astonishing feat, and probably helps explain why it’s so entertaining.
But it’s also easy to see that Sexy Beasts is basically an essay on why you can’t fall in love with on a reality TV show with someone dressed as a sexy dolphin. In the show itself, we have one contestant dressed as a Tin Man get booted after a lacklustre date — he’s so excited about NOT having to spend any more time with the person who booted him, that he literally whoops and skips with joy off the show. Or there’s even one guy (Wolf) who chooses the winner of his episode (Owl), who turns around and essentially says “thanks, I like you as a friend”.
Relationship YouTuber Iona Yeung has seen the show, and thinks there’s little chance that it can create an environment conducive to finding love.
“I think it’s unrealistic to date/fall in love based on personality alone,” she told Junkee. “There has to be physical attraction. Otherwise it’s just like a platonic relationship. There’s a reason why profile photos can make or break a match. In real life, you see someone you’re attracted to and then get to know their personality — it’s the same process with online dating. In the show, contestants can see each other’s physical shape which can help them gauge attraction. But I’m sceptical.”
Unfortunately, there’s good reason to be sceptical — as this recent investigation into the cast’s Instagram proves, none of the couples are still together (and in fact, when it comes to the sexy demon and the monkey, there’s seems to be some TENSION).
I think the show asks an interesting question about the importance of physical attraction in a relationship, but the journey Sexy Beasts takes to find the absurd, depressing, entirely expected answer is where true and blissful entertainment is born.
Sometimes, you gotta be prepared for the unexpected…especially on #SexyBeasts. pic.twitter.com/5vFTbSiHO2
— Netflix ANZ (@NetflixANZ) August 2, 2021
Sexy Beasts is currently streaming on Netflix.
Patrick Lenton is a writer and author. His new book Sexy Tales of Paleontology is out now. He tweets @patricklenton.