Why aren’t more people talking about Beautiful People on Logo? The BBC series about Barney’s creative director Simon Doonan’s childhood (updated from the ’60s to the ’90s) is the kind of deliriously whacked-out comedy that should inspire a cult following—especially since it’s produced by one of the men behind Absolutely Fabulous.Beautiful People being British, half the jokes fly over my head, but who can care when there’s a fearlessly gay 13-year-old on television fully supported by his parents? When the young Simon (Luke Ward-Wilkinson) leaves for school in costume to audition for the school’s production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat, he and his mother (scene-stealer Olivia Colman) sashay down the street singing “Take That Look Off Your Face” from Song and Dance, while his best friend Kylie (Layton Williams) offers up a high-kicking version of “Tomorrow” and the neighborhood’s mean girl belts “Don’t Rain on My Parade” before they all head off to school singing “Ease on Down the Road.”
Smartly going for the darkly comedic zaniness of AbFab, Beautiful People is another wise move on the part of Logo. If The Big Gay Sketch Show is frequently as dull and inexplicable as Saturday Night Live, at least Logo offers genuinely entertaining shows like Sordid Lives (which sadly looks unlikely for a second season), Rick and Steve: The Happiest Gay Couple in All the World, and breakout hit RuPaul’s Drag Race. Beautiful People fits in nicely with those shows, even with its determinedly British, hyper-realistic style that finds a grandmother’s death from a microwave explosion played for laughs. With only three episodes left, make Beautiful People your must-watch summer TV fare. Think of it as a crisp gin and tonic in the middle of a miserable television heat wave exemplified by I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here.
Photo courtesy of Logo.
