Sexy Beasts

Nowadays, one might turn on the TV and wonder whether Planet of the Apes has come true. Not so much the ape apocalypse part, more the proliferation of bizarre animal masks in mass entertainment. The latest masked reality format is Netflix’s Sexy Beasts, a dating show where the contestants are heavily made up as everything from aliens and beavers to wolves and zombies. Each episode sees one single “beast” go on “dates” with three candidates of the opposite sex, the lack of gay representation seeming even weirder than the costumes.

As in previous Netflix series Love Is Blind, the point is to prioritise personality over appearance, though this falls apart faster than one loses respect for comedian Rob Delaney as the narrator. “This show’s all about what’s on the inside,” he lies, the moment of truth inevitably being the unmasking when the contestant declares whether they have made the right choice, based on their chosen partner’s looks. Invariably they have because everyone involved professes to at least a passing interest in modelling.

Sexy Beasts is a dating show in the same way The Apprentice is a business show or Mrs Brown’s Boys is a comedy show in that it features no actual dating. Despite its anti-superficiality premise, the hermetically edited and obviously scripted interactions ensure that no personalities are ever seen. Instead one gets such insightful exchanges as a devil telling a statue, “I just want to follow my intuition,” and the statue replying, “I love culture” – ironic for a man on a show that exemplifies the race to the bottom. And we are probably not there yet.

The genre is following the Storage Wars model that launched a slew of shows about buyers pretending to bid on storage containers without knowing what is inside, except now the containers are people and the contents are empty. This particular iteration of the Blind Date formula dates back further than the 2014 British version of Sexy Beasts to the short-lived 2003 series Mr Personality (essentially The Bachelorette but the men are in masks and the host is Monica Lewinsky). At the time it was too weird; now it blends into the schedules.

Dan Meier

Sexy Beasts is released on Netflix on 19^th July 2021.

Watch the trailer for Sexy Beasts here: