Static Thoughts - Beauty and the Beast (2012)

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Back in March, I took a look back at the 1987 Beauty and the Beast live action TV show.  If you need a refresher on that I said that it had some charming elements but was ultimately too much of a product of its time.  At the end of that article, I mentioned that there was a reboot of the show in 2012.  Well, now seems about the right time to tackle that particular piece of bizarre TV ephemera, especially given it’s the anniversary of the release of the animated Beauty and the Beast adaptation. 

However, the show itself has left me a little stymied.  It’s not exactly a bad series it’s just not interesting enough on its own to actually discuss so this will be less of a review than the previous article.  Instead, think of this as a retrospective as I think the way Beauty and the Beast (2012) actually happened is way more interesting than the show itself.  It’s a strange one-shot of a series that embodies the last moment in time when its various trends could come together in this way. 

Beauty and the Beast may have premiered in 2012 but to really understand how it happened we have to go back to 2009 to a little film series called Twilight.  Though the first film premiered in 2008 it was Twilight: Eclipse in 2009 that really cemented the series as the first genuine success story of the new media era ushered in by the rise of social media. 

I feel like even now the hatred towards Twilight and the way it faded from immediate view as its fan base aged into early adulthood has kind of erased how truly influential it actually was.  We forget this now but Twilight was the true launch point for a ton of imitators in the supernatural romance and young adult genres, which ultimately proved its own undoing when one such imitator, The Hunger Games, eclipsed it. 

It also didn’t help that most of the diet Twilight offerings didn’t end up tracking.  Stuff like City of Bones, Red Riding Hood, I am Number Four, and Beautiful Creatures just aren’t going to stick in anyone’s mind.  The one exception to this was the Vampire Diaries, a 2009 CW supernatural drama that only just recently concluded.  It was a big hit for CW and became one of their major success stories of the late 2009s/early 2010s.  A lot of that had to do with timing for the CW as well as Vampire Diaries ended up perfectly situated to slide into the place Smallville once occupied as that series started to wind down. 

Speaking of, Smallville ending its run in 2011 is another major part of what ended up driving CW to launch their Beauty and the Beast reboot because this story about a mostly forgotten genre show is rife with OTHER curiously forgotten genre shows.  I really mean that with Smallville, it’s curious how much the show has just been forgotten by geek culture now that we’ve been basically given everything by more creative and ambitious producers. 

There was a time when Smallville’s weird, minimalist, fashion model vision of heroes like Martian Manhunter or Flash was all we could hope for but in a time when Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters are coming to our TVs this fall, it’s hard to still feel appreciative of a show that was so limited.  However, Smallville was one of the CW’s biggest guns for years so its impending conclusion meant they needed something alongside Vampire Diaries to fill its slot.

That back-story of needing to fill a Smallville shaped hole in the broadcast schedule in a time of Twilight explains 2/3rds of what Beauty and the Beast is: a superhero show and a fantasy romance show, but there’s still one more element to explain- the fairy tale origin.  After all, you probably could’ve made a similar pitch just swapping out the Beast for Frankenstein, especially with Teen Wolf hitting big in 2011.  However, CW decided to try and get in on the ground floor of what they rightly predicted was going to be the next big fantasy trend of the 2010s: reimagined fairy tales. 

Nowadays this particular “trend” has translated into just Disney dominating the marketplace and quickly transition from adaptations of their animated classics to transliterations of them, as we saw with THIS year’s underwhelming Beauty and the Beast adaptation.  However, back in 2011, when Beauty and the Beast (2012) was getting off the ground fantasy was a much more open genre.  

Harry Potter was over and Game of Thrones wasn’t quite established yet as the new big aesthetic everyone had to chase.  What’s more, stuff like Once Upon A Time, Grimm, Snow White and the Huntsman, Mirror Mirror, and Alice in Wonderland had all made some serious waves so the decision seemed pretty obvious. 

So, how did all of that translate into a show?  In a word: poorly.  The series is exceedingly generic and I really don’t think the people in charge fully grasped the nature of what they were adapting.  The set-up still follows the 1987 outline, with the lead character Catherine as a law enforcement professional whose life becomes intertwined with the beast, Vincent.  The big change this time is that Vincent is just a handsome dude because the show didn’t have the make-up budget or courage to make him inhumanly ugly. 

Actually, I think the change also has a lot to do with filling the superhero hole Smallville left, especially as the genre was gaining steam at the time.  This new Vincent was a soldier in Iraq who was experimented on and gained the power to transform into a rampaging, super powerful beast or “Hulk” if you will.  It’s such an odd decision as it completely robs the “Beast” side of the fairy tale; he’s just a hot dude who sometimes becomes a monster.  Vincent doesn’t even live in the sewers in this version; he shares a man cave with his comic relief sidekick. 

As such Beauty and the Beast never rises in quality above “middling,” which it’s pretty clear CW was aware of because they decided to hedge their bets with it and green light a second show to fill the Smallville gap, a little number called Arrow. 

When I say Beauty and the Beast only could’ve happened when it did Arrow is a big part of that as its success combined with Marvel’s phase 2 expansion into TV fired the starter on the superhero-dominated TV landscape we have today.  That’s not the only reason, obviously, as Game of Thrones/Disney’s takeover of the fantasy genre would’ve made the show a hard fit in the mid-2010s and the Hunger Games helped pretty much kill romantic fantasy in favor of young adult dystopian fiction.  Even the slick TV production aesthetic feels curiously dated, it’s all artificial lighting and grungy white people exuding the vibe of a mid-2000s horror film that’s been neutered for TV. 

I talk a lot about pop culture history on this blog and as part of that focus, I’ve developed a few principals for discussing transitions from one decade to the next.  One of the big rules I go by is that any film made in the 3 years before or after a decade change can go either way.  Sometimes you could predictive stuff that sets the tone going forward like Star Wars in 1978, other times you get weird throwbacks like Dragonslayer in 1981.  Other times still you get stuff like Beauty and the Beast, which feels like a relic from some aborted decade that never truly was and, judging by the show, we’re all probably better off said decade never came about. 

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