The sound and the furry
A grasshopper and a dolphin walk into a bar. There's no joke here, just romance: In Netflix's new reality show Sexy Beasts, which premières on July 21, hopeful daters don prosthetic-heavy disguises in search of a connection beyond physical attraction, a blind date by way of The Masked Singer and a nightmare.
A trailer was recently posted online to varying degrees of intrigue and disgust.
“Welcome to the strangest blind date ever,” says comedian Rob Delaney, the narrator.
Sexy Beasts is actually a new version of a British show that debuted in 2014 and appeared for U.S. audiences in 2015 on the network A&E.
After getting to know the other singles, contestants will have to decide which one will be their “sexy beast,” and then finally get to see each other's real faces.
The response on Twitter was swift and overwhelmingly mocking, with some listing all the shows that have been cancelled to make way for whatever this is.
“Any day now we'll find out all the Netflix HQ staff died in a fire or something years ago and their whole business strategy ever since has been the result of the servers achieving conscience and desperately trying to understand humanity, and failing miserably at it,” someone tweeted.
The show will become the latest to join the landscape of buzzy Netflix reality shows. Love Is Blind, another dating show where singles don't see the face of the person they're talking to as they fall in love through conversation alone. On The Circle, contestants living in their own apartments talk to each other through a social media-like chat platform, with the goal of becoming the top influencer and sniffing out catfishes.
Like Love Is Blind, Sexy Beasts is supposed to be about connection on a deeper level. Some argue the contestants are not actually concealing much of anything.
“All those people are thin and attractive underneath (the) costumes so the `based on personality alone' thing is a bit of a stretch,” someone tweeted.
Though love might not be entirely blind in this case, it is strange.