TV: Beauty and the Beast

Beauty and the Beast was a fairly popular urban fantasy back in the late 1980s. I didn't watch the series in the beginning, and I don't recall what prompted me to tune in late in the second season, right before Linda Hamilton (Catherine) left the series and everything changed.

I never did see how the series began, so when I found Season 1 on DVD for $10 at Big Lots, I picked it up.

Wow. It's really sappy and weepy. I don't know how different it was when I started watching it from how it was in the beginning. I've been reading a bit online, and I gather that the producing staff (perhaps to meet network demands) made a bunch of changes in the second and third season to try to draw in more male viewers. Or maybe I was just dumber 20 years ago.

Right now, I'm watching episode 9 "Dark Spirit." In the first scene, a mature man is at a dinner party when he starts to appear ashen, he's complaining of being hot, and he's hallucinating that bugs are crawling on him. So, he's acting really strange and he looks ill. The people around the table keep trying to make toasts, and then when he jumps up from the table and stumbles across the room, they're just standing there. How about asking if he's okay and calling for an ambulance? Later, Catherine is in her office, and now she's been drugged, and her boss is just saying, "Take the afternoon off," when he should be insisting that she go to the hospital for a tox screen.

Every episode, it seems, someone does something incredibly stupid like that.

Plus, Catherine and Vincent (Ron Perlman) are clearly in love with each other. Vincent is not grotesque or anything. What's keeping them apart? Their own prejudices? 

It's not like the stories don't make good points sometimes, but they're mostly just cheesy, and that's not a word I use lightly.


If it gets any better, I'll write an update.