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This Friday marks the premiere of Disney’s live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast. The hotly anticipated film will be Disney’s 7th live-action fairy tale blockbuster and is basically the company’s way of planting their flag onto the fantasy genre. There were sporadic competitors but ultimately Disney’s brand of big-budget fable has become the defining name in post-Game of Thrones mega-fantasy. What’s more, the film is the first major live-action adaptation of Beauty and the Beast in decades, certainly the first major attempt to try and realize the Beast with CGI.
Given the occasion, I thought it’d only be fair to take a look back at the last time this particular fairy tale was given a major release. Back before Disney’s animated adaptation became the Oscar-winning success that completely defines this story there was another Beauty and the Beast, a bizarre 1987 TV series that time has more or less rejected despite featuring Linda Hamilton, Ron Perlman, and George RR Martin, the father of modern fantasy. With such a pedigree how is this series not more widely known; let’s find out.
The first thing to understand about Beauty and the Beast is that I have no idea how or why it happened. I can’t find that much information on the creator, Ron Koslow, and the behind the scenes information about its history from concept to show is pretty sparse. It’s also not like there are any obvious parallels that might explain why it was greenlit. ‘80s live-action genre TV is honestly a bit of a barren wasteland, it’s not as foundational or imaginative as the ‘60s and ‘70s but also not as modern and slick as the ‘90s.
Most ‘80s genre TV was tied into films of the time like Friday the 13th: The Series, Freddy’s Nightmares, The Twilight Zone, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, and even Greatest American Hero, a bizarre attempt to capitalize on the Superman films from a decade with no other notable superhero live action shows. The strange thing is that Beauty & the Beast isn’t based on any movie and more than that it doesn’t even fit into a cinematic style of the time.
The set-up for Beauty and the Beast is that Linda Hamilton plays the character Catherine, an assistant district attorney in New York who stumbles upon a vast underground utopia. The underground society, dubbed the World Below, is protected by Vincent, a lion-man type beast played by Ron Perlman under A LOT of make-up. What’s strange is how little of the Beauty and the Beast mythos makes it into the show beyond that cursory set-up.
Vincent may be a beast but he was never a man like in the fable, in fact, the show never explains why Vincent is this cat creature or really where he came from aside from some lies and half-truths in season 3. There are no other supernatural elements of the show outside Vincent and his psychic powers- did I forget to mention that? Yeah, as one of the show’s plot contrivances Vincent has a psychic bond he forms with Catherine in episode 1 so he can always find her and always knows when she’s in trouble.
So, without any kind of ticking clock curse or even an option for Vincent to turn human again, you might wonder what the actual conflict of this show is? Well, it’s that together Vincent and Catherine solve crimes. Seriously, the show is basically a case-of-the-week mystery where one of the detectives is a mutant cat man who lives in the sewers. My first guess was that the whole “loveable sewer monster” angle was something Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles inspired or that the urban fantasy set-up was following in the steps of the He-Man movie but both of those came out AFTER Beauty and the Beast premiered.
I will admit it’s a bit misleading saying the show was all about solving crimes as there was a major romantic element to the series, though it wasn’t exactly explicit. The show clearly didn’t want to risk any claims of impropriety by having the Catherine/Vincent relationship go beyond hugging, also the prosthetics are obviously pretty fragile.
Despite this, the series is steeped in the trappings of cheesy romance, a lot of soft sensitivity and long stretches of Vincent and Catherine reading classic poetry together in his Phantom of the Opera lair. Phantom of the Opera is probably what the show is looking to emulate incidentally, even though the musical only premiered a year before Beauty and the Beast, which makes the connection questionable at best.
Season 2 actually doubled down on the romantic aspects of the show, to such a degree that seasons 1 and 2 are basically different series, a trend that would continue into season 3. Season 2 almost completely abandoned the crime elements of the show along with the main characters to a large degree. Suddenly the focus was on the other under-dwellers of the World Below and their various problems, with Vincent and Catherine as something akin to the show’s hosts.
Sporadically they’d help out but it wasn’t anything much or that engaging and the ratings absolutely tanked, which is half of what led to a completely revamped season 3. The other half of that revamp origin was that Linda Hamilton had become pregnant and wanted out of the show so in Season 3 she was killed off and replaced by Diana Bennett, a detective played by Jo Anderson.
I honestly can’t imagine what the season 2 to 3 switch must’ve been like to see as it happened because it is a stark change. Season 2 was much sleepier and quieter than season 1 but season 3 doubles down on the darkest elements in the extreme. First Catherine somehow becomes pregnant with Vincent’s child then she’s kidnapped by a serial killer, held imprisoned till she gives birth, and then gets murdered. It’s such an incredibly brutal way to kill off a lead and almost out of character for the show but…it actually kind of works.
Look, Beauty and the Beast is not a great show and its big problem is the cheese-ball cul-de-sac of romantic indulgence that tended to weigh everything down. Getting more brutal with Catherine’s death and Vincent becoming a more disconnected and violent lead was the way to go, though it was probably too late as the rating didn’t recover and the show ended at season 3.
So far I’ve been pretty negative about the show but I will say, if you want to watch it, there is one thing I can recommend: Ron Perlman. He’s always giving it his all on the program and is pretty much always great. I think people have the bad habit of writing off Perlman as just playing a larger version of his own persona but he’s got real range here despite acting through a ton of make-up.
Actually, it was this role more than anything else that helped him land his position as the original Hellboy. Aside from the make-up, there’s also a whole subplot in the show about Vincent’s relationship to an elderly mentor who founded the world of misfits who he calls “Father,” which seems pretty on the nose. I’m actually fairly certain the series has had a major effect on director Guillermo Del Toro given how much of his sensibilities are based around monster romance.
Overall Beauty & The Beast feels like a good idea executed at the wrong time. If the show had come out in the ‘90s it would’ve had an easier time fitting into the landscape alongside Buffy and The X-Files, not to mention the urban fantasy trend kicked off by The Crow. As is the series is just way too rooted in the sensibilities of ‘80s television, which are less than stellar if we’re being brutally honest here.
Turns out there’s a very good reason no one is trying to resurrect the likes of Alf or Small Wonder and the ‘80s TV revivals we do get end up train wrecks like MacGyver or Dynasty. There are exceptions like Teen Wolf and indeed someone did try and revive TV’s Beauty and the Beast but that’s a story for another time. For now, I’ll just say that if you’ve got a stomach for long, cheesy poetry inter-spliced with junky network TV mysteries this is the show for you…or if you really love Ron Perlman.
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