Summary:
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Netflix surprised fans by renewing Tyler Perry’s “Beauty in Black” for a fourth season after initially announcing its end.
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The show has been a hit for Netflix, with high viewing numbers, but reviews are mixed.
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While some fans are excited for more, others are calling for the show to end due to fatigue and negative stereotypes.
Netflix told fans in December that Tyler Perry’s “Beauty in Black” would wrap after three seasons.
Seven months later, the streamer changed its mind, and it did so before season 3 has even shown up on the platform.
On July 23, Perry and stars Taylor Polidore Williams and Crystle Stewart appeared in a video posted across Netflix and Perry’s social channels to announce a fourth season. Perry opened by telling viewers the Bellaries aren’t finished causing trouble and that the cast had been sitting on the secret as long as they could.
“Beauty in Black is back for Season 4, and the Bellarie family’s story is far from finished,” Perry told Netflix’s Tudum. He added that he found more he wanted to explore and thanked the audience that stuck with the show from the start.
The show has been a quiet monster for Netflix since it premiered in October 2024. Season 1 spent seven weeks in the Global Top 10 and hit No. 1 in 28 countries.
Season 2, split into two parts with the back half landing in March 2026, spent six weeks in the Global Top 10 and topped charts in 17 countries.
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Across its first two seasons, “Beauty in Black” has cleared 1.048 billion viewing hours and roughly 104 million views, according to analysis from What’s on Netflix. That’s 32 episodes doing the kind of volume most prestige dramas never touch.
Perry also produces at a speed that makes the math work. Williams told TVLine that all of season 3 has already been shot, and that the entire season was filmed in six days.
The review picture is messy, mostly because barely anyone in the critical establishment has bothered.
Rotten Tomatoes lists season 1 at 60% on the Tomatometer, but that score rests on four reviews. Season 2 sits at 88% off a single review. When the show launched in 2024, coverage cited a 47% audience score even as it took the No. 1 spot on Netflix’s global chart with 8.7 million views and 57.4 million viewing hours in a single week.
The reviews that do exist are blunt. Decider’s Mark Graham called it a frothy, twisted soap worth bingeing while noting it isn’t prestige TV. Ready Steady Cut gave it 1 out of 5. LeisureByte gave it 2 out of 5 and said the swearing and nudity didn’t add up to a story worth caring about.
None of that has mattered to the audience, which tracks with Perry’s whole career. His film “Divorce in the Black” landed a 0% critic score and a 73% audience score. “Mea Culpa” pulled 17% from critics and still performed on Netflix.
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The loyalists were thrilled. Commenters on Deadline thanked Perry and Netflix for listening to viewers, with one saying they wished more executives responded to their audiences that way. Williams had previously told TVLine that nobody in the cast understood why the show was ending in the first place, which gave fans an easy villain in the original cancellation.
The exhausted camp wants it over. British outlet The Mirror ran a piece on fans telling Netflix to let the show rest. Audience reviews echo the fatigue, with complaints about scenes that drag, dialogue that repeats itself, and episodes that could lose half their runtime without losing anything.
Then there’s the recurring argument about what the show represents. One Deadline commenter accused it of pushing negative stereotypes about Black people. Another pushed back and pointed out that soaps of every cast composition traffic in the same betrayals and vices, and that the criticism lands differently only because this one is all Black. A third defended Perry as writing about corruption among the rich regardless of race.
That fight has followed Perry for two decades. It isn’t going anywhere.
Here’s the frustrating part. Netflix has not announced a premiere date for season 3, despite the fact that it’s already in the can. Season 4 has no date, no plot details, and no casting news beyond the assumption that the core ensemble returns.
Netflixlife reported that Perry’s most recent guidance puts season 3 in 2027. If that holds, season 4 realistically lands in late 2027 at the earliest and more likely 2028.
Netflix says additional season 4 details will come later. Given that the streamer just spent seven months publicly committed to ending this show, “later” is doing some heavy lifting.
Seasons 1 and 2 are streaming now.
