Thought-provoking science fiction is in short supply on network TV in the U.S. — so it's a hopeful sign that NBC has ordered a pilot for Beautiful People. In this near-future-set show, human-appearing robots live among us, as the perfect slaves. What could possibly go wrong?
Here's everything you need to know about NBC's dystopian Beautiful People. Spoilers ahead...
We managed to score a look at a couple different drafts of the script of Beautiful People, which was written by former MadTV castmember Michael McDonald. Here's what we've learned.
First of all, Beautiful People is really dark, and more than a little sadistic at times. It's not at all subtle, though — it's in the grand tradition of dystopian "what if" scenarios in which a terrible injustice is being perpetrated throughout society, but somehow most people don't see it. The audience will be left in absolutely no doubt, at the end of a single episode, that these androids, or "Mechanicals," are people who deservehuman rights.
And Beautiful People manages to be a fun mashup of several other stories about artificial intelligence and society — we compared it to Caprica in our first write-up about it. But there are also echoes of Blade Runner, with a whole division of cops assigned to chase down "defective" Mechanicals who develop feelings. There's a healthy dose of Stepford Wives, as people feel free to use the beautiful, perfect-looking Mechanicals for their most obvious purpose.
The pilot begins with a long tease, in which you see a family eating breakfast, and you realize that something is weird about them but you don't know what. There's a long, slow build-up, in which we mostly follow the daughter of the family, Tina. She's an adorable little girl, who dreams about being a ballerina and picks up acorns, imagining them turning into beautiful trees.
So it's a huge shock when Tina's hit by a car, towards the end of the opening teaser. And an even bigger shock when everybody acts as though the biggest problem is that her head left a dent in the car's front bumper. What an inconvenience! "I'm worried about the car," says Tina's mom Susan afterwards. "She was pretty small. She couldn't
have caused much damage," says Tina's dad, David. Later, Susan goes to wash the blood and hair off the car's front bumper, and apologize to the driver for the accident.
This shocking event — a bright little girl being hit by a car, and everybody treating it as a minor inconvenience to the driver — resonates through the rest of the pilot, as we see how the Mechanicals are enslaved. They're constrained by Asimov's good old Three Laws of Robotics. They're destroyed if they show the slightest sign of emotion. They're even given a weird drug, called Compliance, to prevent them from having any nasty mood swings. They all have bar codes on the backs of their necks.
And yet, they're clearly people in every way that matters. They have family units, like Tina and her parents. They respond to things with real emotion. Their children have to go to school, so they can learn all the nuances of human society. (The high-end "Mechanicals" like Tina and her family have no metal parts — instead, they're more like cyborgs, with some silicon chips and plastic, but also organic parts grown from the DNA of John Does, and possibly federal prisoners as well.)
We won't give away any major spoilers about Beautiful People here — pretty much all the plot information we're mentioning was included in the first press reports about the show. But based on the pilot script, it's a fascinating dystopian thought exercise, and we'd love to see more.
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