Beauty and the Beast

A Not-So-Classic Fairy Tale

Star-crossed love is the theme of the fantasy romance series Beauty and the Beast (not to be confused with the fairy tale of the same name or the Disney movie based on the fairy tale).

The Star-Crossed

Catherine Chandler (Linda Hamilton) is a member of the ruling elite. Rich and beautiful, she is a lawyer working in her father's law firm and living in a luxury highrise in New York City.

Vincent (Ron Perlman) is a freak. A large and physically powerful but gentle-natured man with the face (and the claws!) of a lion, he lives in seclusion in the tunnels below the city's subway system. He comes to the surface of the city only at night, heavily cloaked.

Catherine is already discontented with her life of pointless privilege when everything changes. Mistaken for a witness in an upcoming trial, she is snatched by thugs and attacked, her face slashed. Vincent finds her and takes her to the tunnels where she is nursed back to health. At first fearful of Vincent's appearance, Catherine comes to appreciate the gentle man inside.

Returned to the world of the surface, Catherine changes her life radically, going to work for the DA's office, taking martial arts. She and Vincent, residents of two very different worlds, try to forget one another.

But Catherine and Vincent share a bond now. They can feel the other's feelings. This comes in handy when Catherine is in danger; Vincent can sense it and come to her rescue. And they have to admit that they care too much about one another to go their separate ways.

The Underground Society

Beauty and the Beast, for all its crime plots, is essentially the love story of Catherine and Vincent. Despite Catherine's busy life, the demands of her DA boss Joe Maxwell (Jay Acovone) and Elliot Burch (Edward Albert) the billionaire who wants to marry her, she spends as much time as she can with her secret true love Vincent, usually in his tunnel home.

It is the tunnel society that ads a layer of exoticism to the show. Peopled by 'life's losers' from the surface, the tunnel dwellers, led by Father (Ray Dotrice), the man who found and raised Vincent, have created a Utopia out of time. The clothes they fashion out of rags have a distinctively Elizabethan look to them. It is an artistic and non-materialist society, like a hippy commune only better organized and better educated.

Beauty and the Beast Show History

Beauty and the Beast premiered on CBS in 1987, and ran for two and a half seasons. The show wasn't done in by bad ratings, but by Linda Hamilton's decision to leave after the second season.

Beauty and the Beast dealt with Hamilton's departure by killing off her character, after having her give birth to a child from her up-to-this-point pure and platonic love affair with Vincent. Catherine was murdered by a crazed villain who stole the baby, that Vincent then had to search for and rescue, and... Never mind.

A Valuable Lesson

The sad travesty of the partial third season should be a lesson to television producers everywhere - if your show is a romance, and one of your two leads decides to leave, cancel the show. Really. Just go ahead and cancel it. Don't try to reformat, reinvent, repurpose, reparadigm, reimagine, or anything else. Just cancel it.

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