Beauty & The Beast 5 Minute Preview: Too Much Metaphor, Not Enough Beast

‘You’re Vincent Keller. You look pretty good for a dead guy,‘ says Kristin Kruek’s Detective Chandler, summarizing in one sentence what is wrong with the CW’s upcoming Beauty and the Beast.

Very loosely based on the 1980’s version starring Linda Hamilton (Terminator) and Ron Perlman (Hellboy), the CW’s Beauty and the Beast centers on a homicide detective (Kruek) who discovers a clue that leads her to a handsome doctor named Vincent Keller (Jay Ryan), reportedly killed by enemy fire while serving in Afghanistan in 2002.

Catherine learns that Vincent is has been in hiding for the past 10 years in order to to guard his secret – when he is enraged, he becomes a terrifying beast, unable to control his super-strength and heightened senses. Well that’s the idea anyway, but from what we can glean from this new extended five minute preview for the show, Vincent seems to turn into a mildly scarred, gruff yet obviously still handsome man with added anger issues.

The CW Network is famous for being the home of the handsome, and it would be an unusual step for them to cast an ugly or disfigured (even by means of prosthetics) hero. However, Jay Ryan’s strategic scarring just doesn’t come close enough to beastly for the central premise of the show to ring true.

We are therefore left to assume Vincent’s beastliness is an inner struggle against his baser instincts. “You are crazy, showing up here alone. I could kill you in less than a second,” he rages at Catherine in a moment of inner beastliness. But we know he won’t.

Heavy on the metaphor, easy on the eyes seems to be the CW’s watch words where this one is concerned.

Catch Beauty and the Beast Thursdays on the CW this Fall.