Paramount+'s Sexy Beast Prequel Struggles to Match Original

Despite Criticism, Series Maintains Iconic Characters' Rise to Power and Original's Sexiness

The Paramount+ TV series Sexy Beast, a prequel to the 2000 Jonathan Glazer crime drama of the same name, fails to accomplish a seamless tie-in with the original film, stretching out each incidental line of dialogue and subtle allusion into an 8-episode slog.
The series fails to break out of its predecessor’s shadow, failing to meaningfully build on the film’s core characters and dissipating the menace around the character Don.
The series takes a lean 85-minute film and torturously stretches its plot points to gratuitous extremes, coming across more like an awkwardly-extended movie than anything else.
Despite the criticism, the series does justice to the three iconic characters as it shows their rises to power, and manages to maintain the sexiness of the original film.
The series faces the challenge of finding an audience, given that it is a prequel to a decades-old movie that barely made $10 million at the box office.