Reality TV’s Absurd New Extreme
At a posh bar somewhere in the U.K., a devil is on a date with a statue. The two sip their drinks and make stilted conversation. “I moved to New York to pursue modeling,” the devil says, her horns protruding from the top of her head, her cherry-red cheeks stretching with her mouth as she smiles. “Ooh, I did a bit of modeling myself!” her flint-skinned date replies. The two don’t find much else to agree on (the demon will soon break things off with the sculpture), but modeling? This, they have in common.
Welcome to Sexy Beasts, the Netflix dating show that takes the concept of the “blind date” and shrouds it in layers of latex. The series is a new entry in an old genre that includes The Dating Game and Love Is Blind—a reality competition that, bemoaning dating’s superficiality, attempts to inject some corrective realness into its manufactured courtships. But Sexy Beasts, whose second season premiered this month, has a distinctly absurdist twist. “When it comes to dating, we all go for looks first,” each episode’s introductory voice-over intones. “So in this show, everyone looks as weird as possible.”
[Read: Love Is Blind was the ultimate reality-TV paradox]
Call it camp-ouflage. The costumes of —elastic, protruding, disguising every feature of the wearers’ faces save for their teeth and eyeballs—work primarily to be amusing. (Kelechi the rooster has two wattles that hang from his chin and sway insouciantly as he speaks; several contestants discover what happens when champagne flutes contend suggests, is a means of vision.
