By Chucky Waka of T.V. Guide, Host of "You Heard it Here Either Second or Not at All: An American Roundtable of America's Tabloid Scriveners," on TV Land (Mondays at 3 am e.s.t., Wednesdays at 3:15 am e.s.t., every other Friday at noon, e.s.t., and Sundays at 7 am, e.s.t., 11:30 am, e.s.t., 5:15 pm e.s.t., and 11 pm, e.s.t.)Last nite premiered The Beest! on the Arts and Entertainment Channel on the Tee Vee, starring Patrick Dempzee as, I believe, a man named Butch, and a slew of orbiting peripheral secondary characters whose names I can't match with their tele-visages at this moment. A man named Seizer played an important role in the narrative, as well as a buxom dirty-blond female new to the city proper, trying to make her way in either the business world, a high-profile law office or an architectural firm, who has to wake up earlier and earlier each morning in order to further anticipate her proclivity to become lost, unaware of her surroundings, encircled by structures that literally scrape the sky and provide mammoth memories of a bygone Gothic era in which Gargoyles were still en vogue and less expensive, due to inflation being at an all time low, so that even a humble hut, like Harry's Sandwich Shop on Dearborn, could afford a Gargoylet to spook away wayward pigeons and, consequently, their accompanying, unsightly, dirty-pearly shit stains. Because this is the metallic village in which The Beest! lies waiting: Chicago.
I am tempted, as other Tee Vee-nalists have been in recent days, to name the township of Chicago - established in 1837 by Indian Canoe-ists, come from Michigan by way of the eponymous Lake due to the scarcity of the wolverine, their primary source of sustenance, tired from their multi-mile journey, arms weak from paddling carved-down Oak Branches, who dragged themselves ashore, proclaimed the vast inland as theirs, vowed to reform their savage ways upon envisioning the austere beauty of the virgin prairie and build an Indian-heaven never before seen on Earth: steel horses galloping along the edge of the immense Lake, sandwiched by parks of greenery and brown-gray buildings of infinite strength housing the unseen faces of elders and the otherwise forgotten bearers of their past and the prematurely remembered artisans of their future, along with a successful marketplace in which fur and fish and figs from faraway lands freely exchange hands, and many more advancements they could not then foresee - as the main character of this tell-uh-vision program, but I will refrain from doing so. Because a setting is not a character. Characters engage with the setting, typically, and The Beest! is no different: quasi-dirty dealings transpire within the majestic, futuristic cosmic architecture of Willenium Park, Butch firearm-threatens a mouthy, mumbling maiden on a park bench overlooking Montel Harbor, a down-on-his-luck husband smokes himself through the fleshy underside of his mandible with an unregistered six-shooter underneath the sizzling tracks of the fat Blue Line, and Gorky meets at a Wickerman Park spot with the young urban professional of his night visions, dreams fueled by blue balls, the loss of his religion, and Rapid Eye Movement.
Gorky Gonzales, I believe to be his show-name, played by former model Shel Silvershell, is not one of the aforementioned peripheral secondary characters. He is second in command of The Beest!, the most superior planet orbiting Dempzee's star. He is the ne'er-do-well novice, the bane of Butch's being, a theme to which we are introduced in the opening scene: "Thwack! Thwoomp!" say two bullets in a terminal call-and-response, the bronze ejaculate of a government-issued Glock held by Butch's thorn-impaled paw, stopped just short of their gory climax by the lead-laced microfibers of Gorky's surreptitiously-donned Flak Jacket. A brilliant display of the duo's commitment to the case file-prescribed charade. The two Undercover Federales afterward make up, but, like that made by the Needle, the damage is done.
Gorky seeks stress-relief in meetings with the Yup. The romance between the young agent and the fabled long-lost blond swallowed by the city, too far gone yet still so close (the apartment directly above his, specifically), is titillating and wondrously executed. Two citizens, lost in two different ways, struggling valiantly against herd-thinning forces that seek to destroy, find each other over coffee, cocktails, and through mutual indifference to orthodox dating procedures. Will they fall in love or simply submit to the hot carnality of that deadliest of sins? They are, ostensibly, the Ross and the Rachel of this post-9/11, Blagojevich era, Butch being equal parts Chandler and Joey.
Patrick Dempzee is perfectly cast as Butch: gaunt, whiskey-faced (aided and enhanced by the war being waged on his pancreas), a sparsely-whiskered jaw-line. He is faux-criminality incarnate with the pipes to back it up, his voice intermittently loud and hoarse, a subtle drawl that fades inversely proportional to the rising of his rage, culminating in a wrathful, crass, sinister crescendo, an upward sound slope that starts with one of Gorky's many fuck-ups and ends with him cursing both Butch and the day he enlisted in the Academy. It's a tell-uh-vision dream, a conflict worth following.
To watch The Beest! is to attempt to decipher the indecipherable, to become acquainted with the arrogant Undercover Federale, a wholly unknowable being, while privy to a fact which he is not: that he is merely a dirty-work-pawn, a Federal Cipher. How does the viewer invest in such a stereotype, a man renowned for his ability to take on the persona of any scum-dwelling villain, be it arms-dealer, drug-distributor or corrupt cop, with his practiced slipperiness and hardened exterior and manic-depressive interior? Who knows? But I sure had one helluva wild time trying!
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