I mentioned last year, in my review of the BEAUTY AND THE BEAST episode “To Reign in Hell,” that on occasion I’d contemplated the possibility of subjecting that series to an episode-by-episode analysis as I’d done with a few select teleserials. I’ve now re-watched the first season of the 1987-90 show, and I’ve decided that despite the artfulness with which BEAUTY was crafted, it’s more appropriate just to do seasonal overviews of the show on the NUM blog. But since I generally don’t post on theoretical matters over there, I’m going to descant a bit about the nature of the program, in part because BEAUTY was a great favorite of mine back in The Day.
In my “Reign”-review, I devoted almost half the essay to explaining the show’s setup, so I’ll repeat that explanation here:
As of this writing I’m not sure where the 1987-1990 series BEAUTY AND THE BEAST stands. During my contemporaneous viewing of the show, I remember thinking that it did offer a great deal of mythic material. In effect, the show took the romance-dynamic of the literary fairy tale, probably with strong reference to Cocteau’s cinematic adaptation, and transferred that sensibility to the mean streets of New York—or rather, transplanted it beneath those mean streets. This was “the World Below,” an urban faerie-domain beneath the Big Apple. In place of sprites and deathless queens, this world of subterranean tunnels became a haven to all the outcasts from the normal world above—sort of a demi-America within America. The outcasts, almost always attired in quasi-European garb, are led by a spiritual patriarch known only as “Father,” but Father recognizes only one of his children as his True Son, and he’s the greatest outcast of all. Where the original “Beauty and the Beast” had the beastly protagonist cursed by faeries, Vincent is condemned by biology to have the strength, claws, and face of a lion-made-human. And though Vincent does not rule his bizarre domain the way the Beast of the short story ruled his isolated mansion, he becomes the sole focus of the one outsider who comes and goes from the underworld with impunity. “Beauty” Catherine Chandler, a young lawyer is brought to the Tunnels by "Beast" Vincent to save her life, who subsequently forms a “soul connection” with the tender yet passionate lion-man.
But I also said, just before getting into the review proper:
I suspect that BEAUTY AND THE BEAST deserves to rate with the other three programs I mentioned above: as a show with a high incidence of high mythicity episodes. For now, I’ll concentrate on this 1988 offering.
This suspicion may yet be justified by either of the last two seasons, but only a few episodes of Season One qualify as high-mythicity narratives. The problem in my eyes is that the show’s transitions between its two settings—mundane New York City and the “Elfland” of the World Below—mitigates against a strong concrescence of mythic ideas.
The World Below, a.k.a. “The Tunnels,” bears only a mild relationship to the enchanted mansion where the original Beast of the literary fairy tale dwells; in a deeper sense, the subterranean domain is symbolically identical with the faery otherworlds of Celtic myth. These fantastic realms are almost pictured as existing underground, which by itself suggests a strong identity between the people of faerie and the spirits of the dead. All of BEAUTY’s subterranean dwellers begin as inhabitants of the mundane world above, but rather than passing through the veil of death, they are reborn into new lives, laboring to keep their commune-like existence secret from ordinary mortals, aided only by a network of “helpers” who also guard the secret of the Tunnels while still continuing to live in the surface world. In Season One at least, the World Below harbors no supernatural wonders, with the exception that some characters boast gifts that one might explain as “psychic.” Further, the European attire of the dwellers, couple with a marked capacity of some of them to recite Shakespeare and Wordsworth, makes this “demi-America” into a crypto-Europe, not unlike the uncanny environments one finds in the Gothic works of Horace Walpole, Matthew Lewis, and, most importantly, Edgar Allan Poe.
However, a difficulty arises whenever the stories transition into New York. Most fairy tales, whether spawned in folklore or literature, make the mundane world as sketchy as possible, so as to focus on the wonders of faerie. But New York, the domain of heroine Catherine Chandler, must boast at least the broad trappings of reality. The base conflict of the series is that, while the leonine Vincent can occupy the World Below and enjoy a semblance of normalcy, his spirit, at once gentle and savage, cannot possibly prosper within drab reality. In the original fairy tale, the Beast’s story ends when he loses the vesture of animality and becomes a man who can marry the Beauty in her world. But there are no miracle transformations for Vincent, and thereby rests the “impossible love” of Vincent and Catherine.
The first season of the series ends with Catherine considering the possibility of turning her back on the mundane world, and of attempting to live with Vincent in the Tunnels, at least on a trial basis. This development of course would have eliminated the main conflict of the series and the show could have ended in a manner not unlike the climax of the fairy tale. However, the writers found a rather clever way to prolong the agony, by making Catherine Chandler into a Woman with a Mission. Catherine, a child of privilege, suffers trauma and is “reborn” in a different sense than the Tunnel-dwellers: she becomes a do-gooder, obsessed with the holy mission of saving innocents from injustice. A few of Catherine’s altruistic missions are undertaken on behalf of the Tunnel-people, and when this is the case, the potential for mythic symbolism is high. But more often, Catherine defends the banal citizens of a jejune New York, the sort of New York one could find in any bland television cop-show.
It's not that it’s impossible to lend a mythic aura to people and places that would usually be deemed mundane; one can find “big-city” myths in everyone from Faulkner and Dos Passos to Chandler and Spillane. But as I also commented in the “Reign” essay, episodic TV shows are turned out on an exacting schedule. One might argue that the writers of BEAUTY were doing pretty good just to keep building up the Gothic world of the Tunnels, without expecting them to re-imagine the mundane Big Apple as well. Nevertheless, Catherine’s enemies—who inevitably become the enemies of her protector Vincent—are comprised of a boring amalgamation of thieves, pushers, grifters and serial killers, and their presence undermines a lot of the mythic potential of the stories. For that matter, most of the “innocents” are not that symbolically complex either.
Returning to the matter of metaphenomenality, the World Below is usually depicted as an uncanny dominion, just as Vincent’s lion-like appearance is implied to be a freak mutation, albeit one with some rather advantageous abilities. His fangs and claws are just barely within the boundaries of the uncanny, but the empathic bond Vincent shares with Catherine clearly belongs to the world of the marvelous, and so that phenomenality holds sway for every episode.
I think the mythopoeic potentiality was important to the writers, but not quite as much as the dramatic potentiality. Everything in the series had to revolve around the “impossible love,” and thus even episodes weak in myth were capable of generating intense dramatic situations, far more than one could ever find in “any bland television cop-show.” Thus I find that BEAUTY AND THE BEAST most deserves praise for its mastery of dramatic concrescence.
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