Review: “Beautiful People” Returns, Subversive Message Intact

I confess I had a somewhat lukewarm reaction to the first season of Beautiful People, a UK import that aired last year on Logo and quickly developed a cult following.

I loved the premise: a gay man looks back on his childhood antics as a flamboyant boy trapped in a stifling UK suburb with his even-more-flamboyant best friend. And it was impossible not to be impressed by actors like Olivia Colman, as Simon’s gloriously unbalanced mother, and (especially) Luke Ward-Wilkinson, the appealingly gawky rubber-faced actor who plays Simon.

But I’ve never been a huge fan of the 30 Rock-style of scatter-shot comedy where a show is determined to tell six jokes, even though only two of them are funny. And Beautiful People’s scripts sometimes seemed to me to be a little lazily-written – just set-ups to get to the next outrageous joke.

I’m happy to report that the second season of six episodes, which begins this Saturday on Logo, is much stronger and tighter than the first, at least based on the first two episodes made available for preview.

It’s also possible that the break-out success of Glee is making me appreciate that there is an entire genre of entertainment that isn’t about “reality,” and it certainly isn’t about making much sense. It really IS just an excuse to get to the next wacky joke (or the next musical number, in the case of Glee).

And maybe that’s okay.

Layton Williams (left) and Luke Ward-Wilkinson

Each episode of Beautiful People purports to tell the story of how Simon Doonan (very loosely based on a real-life person, the creative director for Barney’s) ended up with a precious item. The joke – and now I can appreciate that it is a joke – is that story of the item itself is almost always just a completely irrelevant after-thought to each episode’s real story.

In the series’ second season, the adult Simon returns to his family in Reading after breaking up with his boyfriend, Sacha. This season, rather than tell Sacha the childhood stories of acquiring his favorite items, he tells the viewer.

In the premiere episode, he tells the story of how he got, or more accurately, swallowed his plastic wedding cake “groom” – but it’s really the story of how he discovers that, just like so many of his classmates, his parents never got around to getting married.