Post by pippin on Aug 5, 2015 1:43:14 GMT -5
Title: Pilot
Directed by: Gary Fleder
Written by: Jennifer Levin & Sherri Cooper
Air date: October11, 2012
Rating: 2.79 viewers / 1.2 demo
A RE-IMAGINING OF THE CLASSIC TALE — When she was a teenager, Catherine “Cat” Chandler (Kristin Kreuk, “Smallville”) witnessed the murder of her mother. Cat would have been killed too, but someone – or something – saved her. Now, years have passed and Cat is a police officer, investigating a case that leads her to the person who saved her: a doctor named Vincent Keller (Jay Ryan, “Terra Nova”). With the help of his childhood friend J.T. Forbes (Austin Basis, “Life Unexpected”), Vincent has been in hiding, guarding his secret — when enraged, he becomes a terrifying beast, unable to control his super strength. Still, Cat is touched by the person that lives within the Beast and she knows she has to keep her relationship with Vincent a secret from her boss, Joe Bishop (Brian White, “The Shield”), her partner, Tess Vargas (Nina Lisandrello, “Nurse Jackie”), and even from her close friend, Evan Marks (Max Brown, “The Tudors”), the medical examiner. Cat and Vincent are powerfully drawn to one another, but they understand that their connection is extremely dangerous for both of them. Gary Fleder directed the episode written by Sherri Cooper & Jennifer Levin (#100).
First promotional image
Comic-con Button Art
First Promo
Showcase Promo
Extended Preview
PILOT SCRIPT
www.zen134237.zen.co.uk/Beauty_and_the_Beast_1x01_-_Pilot.pdf
Reviews
The New York Times
Neil Genzlinger
www.nytimes.com/2012/10/10/arts/television/arrow-and-beauty-the-beast-on-the-cw-network.html?_r=0
The reimagining of “Beauty & the Beast” that CW unveils Thursday night isn’t quite up to the standards of “Arrow,” but its girl-power themes will probably play well to the network’s core audience. Kristin Kreuk is the beauty, playing Catherine Chandler, a police detective who, when she was younger, saw her mother murdered and would have met the same fate if not for the rescue efforts of a mysterious man-beast. We see that deed in flashback, then jump to the present, where Catherine again encounters the beast while investigating a homicide.
The CBS series that worked this territory from 1987 to 1990 was much beloved by its fans, but there are a number of differences here. The new beast, played by Jay Ryan, is not the hairy, catlike half-human of the earlier series. He’s a scarred but otherwise regular-looking guy, unless provoked into a rage-induced transformation reminiscent of the Hulk’s. His origin story, too, has been given a makeover involving the Sept. 11 attacks and a military experiment gone awry.
Mr. Ryan is not going to make anyone forget the haunting voice of Ron Perlman, who played the beast on the CBS show. And Ms. Kreuk and Nina Lisandrello, as her police force partner, are unconvincing as detectives. But the pilot’s hint of a connection between the beast’s condition and the murder of Catherine’s mother offers the promise of future depth.
New York Magazine (Vulture)
Matt Zoller Seitz
www.vulture.com/2012/10/tv-review-beauty-and-the-beast.html
The reboot of Beauty and the Beast (CW, Thursdays, 9 p.m.), suffers from some of the same debilitating style tics that afflict other CW dramas — blandly pretty actors; a choppy/glossy style — but it takes its story seriously and thinks about the implications of what it’s showing us. Because the show has a female lead and is built around themes coded as “girl stuff” (romance, fairy-tale gender archetypes), it’s likely to be written off as minor network fluff, but it’s got more on the ball than the mostly brutal reviews suggest (“laughably bad,” one colleague calls it).
Beauty and the Beast lacks finesse, but it isn’t afraid to dive headfirst into gender archetypes and situate them in the modern world. Cat is never more traditionally “girly” than when Vincent is setting her heart aflutter or saving her from harm, but Kreuk’s conflicted expressions confirm that the heroine isn’t sure how to feel about all that. She’s elated, maybe smitten, then confused and perhaps slightly ashamed of herself for being elated and smitten. She’s a contemporary professional woman, so this mix of reactions makes sense. Cat is elegantly beautiful (in addition to her acting credits, Kreuk was the longtime face of Neutrogena), her look and demeanor coded as “conventionally feminine,” but she also packs a gun and works in a macho profession whose brutal hours make it tough to keep a boyfriend. (In an early scene, Cat discovers that her beau is tired of playing second fiddle to her career and has taken up with someone else; she’s aghast but recovers quickly, reports him for pot possession, and struts off with an eff-you grin.)
Vincent’s even more tortured and self-loathing. The military appears to have infected him with an equivalent of the “rage virus” from 28 Days Later, and he seesaws between sweetness and terrifying anger, even when he’s opening his heart to Cat. Between his empathy, chivalrous impulses, and status as virtual prisoner (he’s basically trapped in that warehouse, his version of the castle from the original fairy tale), Vincent seems too sensitive, too stereotypically womanlike, to pass muster as a macho man, at least by today’s cartoonish standards of “hardness.” But he’s a fearsome soldier whose scarred face is an outward signifier of his combat trauma. Those two aspects, romantic tenderness and controlled bloodlust, give the character a schizoid aspect, nicely articulated via Ryan’s brute-on-the-edge-of-tears voice. The pilot brings Cat face-to-face with the dark side of romance. The murder mystery centers on a manipulative relationship in which a man exploits his mate’s happily-ever-after fantasies while secretly satisfying his urge to rut. The guy is a knave posing as a prince. He’s surrounded himself with a harem, all of whom have been suckered into thinking they’re his one true princess.
This is potent stuff. Beauty and the Beast’s pilot is rarely more than competent, sometimes stubbed-toe clumsy. But if it can hang around for a while, devise a style that matches its story, and tap its stars’ sincerity, it could become a cult hit: perpetually underrated but loved.
The Hollywood Reporter
Tim Goodman
www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/cws-beauty-beast-tv-review-378092
A hilariously bad remake of the original, substituting the amazingly gorgeous Kristin Kreuk and Jay Ryan in the title roles, which is how The CW rolls. I love your crazy, optimistic world view -- which is basically a dream world of super hot people mimicking what normal people do in the real world. I love that you don’t stray too far from form, ever: young, beautiful, thin, impossibly romantic with little splashes of pop culture snark. And all of it playing below the soundtrack of some Band of the Moment.
You also -- and bless you for this -- are tragically, hilariously unaware of your own lack of self-awareness. It is the only possible explanation for your remake of Beauty and the Beast, which is more like Beauty and Beauty With a Slight Scar. Only The CW would take a super hunky dude who would make most women swoon and call him a Beast because he’s got a couple of cuts on his face that, strangely enough, make him magnetically more attractive to other beautiful people.
One note I made was that Kreuk is a good actress who deserves better material. She’s also quite lovely. I underlined that three times, so it must be important (probably because she’s the “beauty” part of the show's title). I would like to think that The CW put this weightless piece of visual confection on the air with a knowing wink. But I fear that it did not.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Rob Owen
communityvoices.post-gazette.com/arts-entertainment-living/tuned-in/34436-tv-review-beauty-and-the-beast-on-the-cw
It’s tough to imagine how anyone could make a more ham-fisted, wreck of a remake of 1980s CBS fantasy series “Beauty and the Beast” than The CW’s effort, debuting on Pittsburgh’s WPCW Thursday at 11:30 p.m. after the Steelers game.
While the original 1987-1990 series that starred Linda Hamilton and Ron Perlman had its share of missteps (killing off the beauty among them), at its heart CBS’s “Beauty and the Beast” was a creative, romantic gem.
The CW’s “Beauty” is laughably bad in myriad ways. There’s no sense of star-crossed lovers, just a plasticized romance between a Cover Girl and a glum, anger-prone male model.
TV Guide
Matt Roush
www.tvguide.com/news/roush-new-season-vampire-diaries-beauty-beast-1054527/
For reasons known only to the most craven of TV gods, The CW has decided to desecrate the memory of this unique series with a miscast, misbegotten reboot, also titled Beauty and the Beast (9/8c), though it might as well be called "Barbie and the Buff." Smallville's Kristin Kreuk has all the authority of a Hooters trainee as the new Cat Chandler, a preposterously unconvincing metropolitan police detective still haunted by the murder of her mother some time ago, during which she first glimpsed the mysterious crusader who takes beastly aim at her enemies. Her Vincent has none of the creature-of-legend tragic-poetic aura of Perlman's "beast." As played by woodenly handsome Jay Ryan (who could pass for Thomas Gibson's younger brother), he might as well live among the beautiful denizens of 90210 if not for a noticeable scar on his cheek — and the fact that when he gets riled, he temporarily morphs into a Junior Hulk rage monster.
Los Angeles Times
Mary McNamara
articles.latimes.com/2012/oct/11/entertainment/la-et-st-beauty-and-the-beast-20121011
The only survivor of one of those super-soldier experiments that screenwriters love so much, Vincent becomes an animal when aroused by anger and, one assumes, any other strong emotion. Afraid for his life and the lives of others, Vincent has spent the last five years in relative captivity trying to find an antidote, with only his dweeby pal J.T. (Austin Basis), video games and a flat screen to distract him.
This has given Vincent plenty of time, apparently, to catch up on past seasons of "Dexter," because he controls his homicidal tendencies with a similar code — he only disembowels and decapitates bad guys. Including and especially those threatening Catherine.
None of the which is even as mildly interesting as it sounds, and, indeed, I grew weary even as I watched, despite Kreuk's hypnotic eyes, the broody lighting and roiling soundtrack. It is all so dreadfully familiar — the lovely, headstrong and feisty heroine, the nice guy who wants her (in this case, the medical examiner played by Max Brown) and the broken bad boy she loves instead.
Even the overlay of a government conspiracy seems tired; the only point of light is provided by Catherine's partner, Tess, who, as played with great common-sense appeal by Nina Lisandrello, clearly deserves to be on a better show. One can only hope that this marks the last limping leg of the inter-species romance, because in real life, true love should not include a partner whose first instinct is to kill you.
More here www.metacritic.com/tv/beauty-and-the-beast-2012/critic-reviews
Directed by: Gary Fleder
Written by: Jennifer Levin & Sherri Cooper
Air date: October11, 2012
Rating: 2.79 viewers / 1.2 demo
A RE-IMAGINING OF THE CLASSIC TALE — When she was a teenager, Catherine “Cat” Chandler (Kristin Kreuk, “Smallville”) witnessed the murder of her mother. Cat would have been killed too, but someone – or something – saved her. Now, years have passed and Cat is a police officer, investigating a case that leads her to the person who saved her: a doctor named Vincent Keller (Jay Ryan, “Terra Nova”). With the help of his childhood friend J.T. Forbes (Austin Basis, “Life Unexpected”), Vincent has been in hiding, guarding his secret — when enraged, he becomes a terrifying beast, unable to control his super strength. Still, Cat is touched by the person that lives within the Beast and she knows she has to keep her relationship with Vincent a secret from her boss, Joe Bishop (Brian White, “The Shield”), her partner, Tess Vargas (Nina Lisandrello, “Nurse Jackie”), and even from her close friend, Evan Marks (Max Brown, “The Tudors”), the medical examiner. Cat and Vincent are powerfully drawn to one another, but they understand that their connection is extremely dangerous for both of them. Gary Fleder directed the episode written by Sherri Cooper & Jennifer Levin (#100).
First promotional image
Comic-con Button Art
First Promo
Showcase Promo
Extended Preview
PILOT SCRIPT
www.zen134237.zen.co.uk/Beauty_and_the_Beast_1x01_-_Pilot.pdf
Reviews
The New York Times
Neil Genzlinger
www.nytimes.com/2012/10/10/arts/television/arrow-and-beauty-the-beast-on-the-cw-network.html?_r=0
The reimagining of “Beauty & the Beast” that CW unveils Thursday night isn’t quite up to the standards of “Arrow,” but its girl-power themes will probably play well to the network’s core audience. Kristin Kreuk is the beauty, playing Catherine Chandler, a police detective who, when she was younger, saw her mother murdered and would have met the same fate if not for the rescue efforts of a mysterious man-beast. We see that deed in flashback, then jump to the present, where Catherine again encounters the beast while investigating a homicide.
The CBS series that worked this territory from 1987 to 1990 was much beloved by its fans, but there are a number of differences here. The new beast, played by Jay Ryan, is not the hairy, catlike half-human of the earlier series. He’s a scarred but otherwise regular-looking guy, unless provoked into a rage-induced transformation reminiscent of the Hulk’s. His origin story, too, has been given a makeover involving the Sept. 11 attacks and a military experiment gone awry.
Mr. Ryan is not going to make anyone forget the haunting voice of Ron Perlman, who played the beast on the CBS show. And Ms. Kreuk and Nina Lisandrello, as her police force partner, are unconvincing as detectives. But the pilot’s hint of a connection between the beast’s condition and the murder of Catherine’s mother offers the promise of future depth.
New York Magazine (Vulture)
Matt Zoller Seitz
www.vulture.com/2012/10/tv-review-beauty-and-the-beast.html
The reboot of Beauty and the Beast (CW, Thursdays, 9 p.m.), suffers from some of the same debilitating style tics that afflict other CW dramas — blandly pretty actors; a choppy/glossy style — but it takes its story seriously and thinks about the implications of what it’s showing us. Because the show has a female lead and is built around themes coded as “girl stuff” (romance, fairy-tale gender archetypes), it’s likely to be written off as minor network fluff, but it’s got more on the ball than the mostly brutal reviews suggest (“laughably bad,” one colleague calls it).
Beauty and the Beast lacks finesse, but it isn’t afraid to dive headfirst into gender archetypes and situate them in the modern world. Cat is never more traditionally “girly” than when Vincent is setting her heart aflutter or saving her from harm, but Kreuk’s conflicted expressions confirm that the heroine isn’t sure how to feel about all that. She’s elated, maybe smitten, then confused and perhaps slightly ashamed of herself for being elated and smitten. She’s a contemporary professional woman, so this mix of reactions makes sense. Cat is elegantly beautiful (in addition to her acting credits, Kreuk was the longtime face of Neutrogena), her look and demeanor coded as “conventionally feminine,” but she also packs a gun and works in a macho profession whose brutal hours make it tough to keep a boyfriend. (In an early scene, Cat discovers that her beau is tired of playing second fiddle to her career and has taken up with someone else; she’s aghast but recovers quickly, reports him for pot possession, and struts off with an eff-you grin.)
Vincent’s even more tortured and self-loathing. The military appears to have infected him with an equivalent of the “rage virus” from 28 Days Later, and he seesaws between sweetness and terrifying anger, even when he’s opening his heart to Cat. Between his empathy, chivalrous impulses, and status as virtual prisoner (he’s basically trapped in that warehouse, his version of the castle from the original fairy tale), Vincent seems too sensitive, too stereotypically womanlike, to pass muster as a macho man, at least by today’s cartoonish standards of “hardness.” But he’s a fearsome soldier whose scarred face is an outward signifier of his combat trauma. Those two aspects, romantic tenderness and controlled bloodlust, give the character a schizoid aspect, nicely articulated via Ryan’s brute-on-the-edge-of-tears voice. The pilot brings Cat face-to-face with the dark side of romance. The murder mystery centers on a manipulative relationship in which a man exploits his mate’s happily-ever-after fantasies while secretly satisfying his urge to rut. The guy is a knave posing as a prince. He’s surrounded himself with a harem, all of whom have been suckered into thinking they’re his one true princess.
This is potent stuff. Beauty and the Beast’s pilot is rarely more than competent, sometimes stubbed-toe clumsy. But if it can hang around for a while, devise a style that matches its story, and tap its stars’ sincerity, it could become a cult hit: perpetually underrated but loved.
The Hollywood Reporter
Tim Goodman
www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/cws-beauty-beast-tv-review-378092
A hilariously bad remake of the original, substituting the amazingly gorgeous Kristin Kreuk and Jay Ryan in the title roles, which is how The CW rolls. I love your crazy, optimistic world view -- which is basically a dream world of super hot people mimicking what normal people do in the real world. I love that you don’t stray too far from form, ever: young, beautiful, thin, impossibly romantic with little splashes of pop culture snark. And all of it playing below the soundtrack of some Band of the Moment.
You also -- and bless you for this -- are tragically, hilariously unaware of your own lack of self-awareness. It is the only possible explanation for your remake of Beauty and the Beast, which is more like Beauty and Beauty With a Slight Scar. Only The CW would take a super hunky dude who would make most women swoon and call him a Beast because he’s got a couple of cuts on his face that, strangely enough, make him magnetically more attractive to other beautiful people.
One note I made was that Kreuk is a good actress who deserves better material. She’s also quite lovely. I underlined that three times, so it must be important (probably because she’s the “beauty” part of the show's title). I would like to think that The CW put this weightless piece of visual confection on the air with a knowing wink. But I fear that it did not.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Rob Owen
communityvoices.post-gazette.com/arts-entertainment-living/tuned-in/34436-tv-review-beauty-and-the-beast-on-the-cw
It’s tough to imagine how anyone could make a more ham-fisted, wreck of a remake of 1980s CBS fantasy series “Beauty and the Beast” than The CW’s effort, debuting on Pittsburgh’s WPCW Thursday at 11:30 p.m. after the Steelers game.
While the original 1987-1990 series that starred Linda Hamilton and Ron Perlman had its share of missteps (killing off the beauty among them), at its heart CBS’s “Beauty and the Beast” was a creative, romantic gem.
The CW’s “Beauty” is laughably bad in myriad ways. There’s no sense of star-crossed lovers, just a plasticized romance between a Cover Girl and a glum, anger-prone male model.
TV Guide
Matt Roush
www.tvguide.com/news/roush-new-season-vampire-diaries-beauty-beast-1054527/
For reasons known only to the most craven of TV gods, The CW has decided to desecrate the memory of this unique series with a miscast, misbegotten reboot, also titled Beauty and the Beast (9/8c), though it might as well be called "Barbie and the Buff." Smallville's Kristin Kreuk has all the authority of a Hooters trainee as the new Cat Chandler, a preposterously unconvincing metropolitan police detective still haunted by the murder of her mother some time ago, during which she first glimpsed the mysterious crusader who takes beastly aim at her enemies. Her Vincent has none of the creature-of-legend tragic-poetic aura of Perlman's "beast." As played by woodenly handsome Jay Ryan (who could pass for Thomas Gibson's younger brother), he might as well live among the beautiful denizens of 90210 if not for a noticeable scar on his cheek — and the fact that when he gets riled, he temporarily morphs into a Junior Hulk rage monster.
Los Angeles Times
Mary McNamara
articles.latimes.com/2012/oct/11/entertainment/la-et-st-beauty-and-the-beast-20121011
The only survivor of one of those super-soldier experiments that screenwriters love so much, Vincent becomes an animal when aroused by anger and, one assumes, any other strong emotion. Afraid for his life and the lives of others, Vincent has spent the last five years in relative captivity trying to find an antidote, with only his dweeby pal J.T. (Austin Basis), video games and a flat screen to distract him.
This has given Vincent plenty of time, apparently, to catch up on past seasons of "Dexter," because he controls his homicidal tendencies with a similar code — he only disembowels and decapitates bad guys. Including and especially those threatening Catherine.
None of the which is even as mildly interesting as it sounds, and, indeed, I grew weary even as I watched, despite Kreuk's hypnotic eyes, the broody lighting and roiling soundtrack. It is all so dreadfully familiar — the lovely, headstrong and feisty heroine, the nice guy who wants her (in this case, the medical examiner played by Max Brown) and the broken bad boy she loves instead.
Even the overlay of a government conspiracy seems tired; the only point of light is provided by Catherine's partner, Tess, who, as played with great common-sense appeal by Nina Lisandrello, clearly deserves to be on a better show. One can only hope that this marks the last limping leg of the inter-species romance, because in real life, true love should not include a partner whose first instinct is to kill you.
More here www.metacritic.com/tv/beauty-and-the-beast-2012/critic-reviews