EVERYTHING YOU NEED YOU KNOW ABOUT “BEAUTY IN BLACK” AHEAD OF SEASON 3

For the completely uninitiated: Tyler Perry's Beauty in Black (because yes, this is a Tyler Perry joint) follows Kimmie, a struggling dancer and sex worker whose attempt to escape a dangerous trafficking operation pulls her into the orbit of the obscenely wealthy, deeply dysfunctional Bellarie family.

On the surface, the Bellaries have it all. They’re the family behind Beauty in Black, a wildly successful hair-care empire, and one of Chicago’s most prominent families. In reality, beneath the polished facade is a mess of greed, secrets, lies, and a whole lot of crime. As the old adage goes, the more money they come across, the more problems they see.

This show has managed to cram so much soap-opera plot into 32 episodes that if you watched the first two seasons but can't remember which Bellarie tried to kill whom, who was sleeping with whose husband, or how exactly Kimmie went from dancing at a strip club to running a multimillion-dollar hair-care company, don't worry. This recap will cover all the major players, the kidnappings, the hit and runs, the presumed dead, the motel-room BBL, and where all this mess currently stands.

Season 1: How Kimmie Went From the Club to the Corner Office

When we meet Kimmie, she’s working as an exotic dancer and sex worker at a club controlled by Jules, a terrifying fixer who also works security for the Bellaries. Apparently one job involving organized crime wasn’t enough.

Kimmie desperately wants out. She even applies for a scholarship to the Beauty in Black cosmetology school, run by Mallory Bellarie, the glamorous public face of the family’s hair-care empire. Mallory is also married to Roy Bellarie, who’s cheating on her with, among other people, Kimmie.

Kimmie’s best friend Rain, meanwhile, gets a black-market BBL hoping to make more money at the club but develops serious blood clots. Kimmie takes her to the hospital despite Jules explicitly forbidding it, since his entire operation depends on nobody asking too many questions about the women working for him.

That crisis brings Kimmie closer to Horace Bellarie, the family patriarch. Horace frequents the club looking for men, and Kimmie essentially tells him: I’ll keep your secret if you help my friend. He agrees. But when Kimmie returns to the hospital and discovers Rain has suddenly vanished from her room with no explanation, she assumes the worst—that Horace had something to do with it and Rain is dead.

What Kimmie doesn’t know is that Horace actually kept his word: he quietly transferred Rain to a better hospital so she could get the care she needed.

Unfortunately, Kimmie learns this approximately five minutes too late.

By then, she’s already agreed to help Angel rob Horace. Mid-robbery, Rain calls, very much alive. And Kimmie realizes she’s made a terrible mistake just as the whole thing devolves into a shoot-out.

Horace survives. Amazingly, his relationship with Kimmie does too.

Meanwhile, Mallory commits a casual hit-and-run.

After learning Roy is cheating, Mallory gets behind the wheel furious, hits a woman, then leaves her for dead in the road.

The woman is Ina, wife of Horace’s brother Norman.

Roy later finds his aunt Ina, and, rather than calling 911 like someone raised on planet Earth, puts her in his trunk. Ina wakes up, escapes, and makes it to a hospital.

Norman becomes obsessed with finding whoever hurt his wife while somehow failing to realize the culprit is sitting across from him at family dinners.

Then Horace makes everything worse.

Because he and Norman are fighting over the company, Horace secretly arranges for someone posing as a nurse to sabotage Ina’s recovery. She becomes brain-dead and ultimately dies. Norman responds by murdering the medical workers transporting her and ordering a hit on Horace’s son Charles.

The assassins shoot up Charles’s yellow Lamborghini and blow it up. But Charles isn’t inside. (Some man from the club stole the car.)

And if you’re beginning to understand the rhythm of Beauty in Black, congratulations.

And then they kidnap Kimmie’s little sister.

Body, one of the women running the club, decides Kimmie is becoming a problem and kidnaps her teenage sister Sylvie, pulling her into the trafficking operation. Sylvie has spent this entire time believing Kimmie works at a hospital, so she gets both a kidnapping and the world’s worst career-day reveal in one evening.

Kimmie finally snaps. She runs Body down with a car. When Delinda, another woman involved in the club’s trafficking operation, refuses to tell her where Sylvie is, Kimmie shoots her. And this is the point where Kimmie stops being a victim and starts becoming a threat.

With Horace’s help, she eventually gets Sylvie back. There’s one small complication: during the rescue, Kimmie steals a car without realizing there’s an elderly man in the back seat. He later dies after missing his insulin and turns out to have connections to some extremely dangerous people. And Angel is the one who gets blamed for the mess.

Then Horace, now hospitalized and increasingly disgusted with his own relatives, comes up with an absolutely deranged but surprisingly effective solution: Marry Kimmie.

The arrangement is more business, protection, revenge, and companionship than romance. Horace gets to keep his fortune away from the relatives circling his hospital bed like Gucci-clad vultures. And Kimmie gets money, power, and the ability to protect Sylvie and Rain.

Season 1 ends with the Bellaries rushing into Horace’s hospital room expecting an inheritance update and instead being introduced to Kimmie as both their new stepmother and their new boss.

Beautiful.

Season 2: Mrs. Bellarie Has Entered the Building

Naturally, nobody takes the marriage well. Horace’s sons, ex-wife, brother—and Mallory especially—are appalled that the woman who was just shaking it at their favorite strip club now controls the family fortune and holds real power at Beauty in Black.

Worse, the company that made them rich is now drowning in debt.

As COO, Kimmie digs into the books, comes up with a plan to save it, and in the process, uncovers shell companies, kickbacks, and the various ways the Bellaries have been using the business as their own personal ATM.

Turns out the woman everyone dismissed might actually know what she’s doing.

Mallory's still furious. She’s spent years running Beauty in Black, only for Horace to hand authority to his new wife after knowing her for approximately twelve minutes.

Eventually, though, Mallory realizes she has a bigger problem than Kimmie.

His name is Roy.

Roy and Mallory have the divorce from hell.

Roy continues cheating because Roy’s only hobbies appear to be infidelity and catastrophic financial decisions.

Mallory ends up catching him with another woman inside their own house, locks them in the bedroom, gets into an SUV, and repeatedly drives into the mansion until it catches fire.

Not the separation strategy most therapists recommend.

Roy escapes the flames. Mallory's officially done with this marriage. Then she learns Roy has put some of his illegal shell companies in her name, meaning his crimes could take her down with him.

Suddenly Kimmie looks less like the enemy and more like an exit strategy.

Mallory and Kimmie realize neither benefits from letting the Bellarie men destroy the company they’re actually capable of running. With Horace supporting them from Italy, where he’s undergoing an experimental cancer treatment, they start working together. They don’t trust each other. They just trust everyone else less.

Charles is also having a terrible year.

Charles has been secretly involved with family attorney Varney, which Roy discovers and uses as blackmail material.

Men from the club attempt to rob Charles. Charles shoots them. All of them. Varney walks into Charles’s house and finds him trying to dismember the bodies, which is one of those relationship moments that really forces you to consider whether you and your partner share the same long-term goals.

When Varney refuses to help with the bodies, Charles calls his mother Olivia. Olivia, amazingly, has a professional cleanup crew on speed dial. We soon learn why: Olivia has her own criminal connections and owes some extremely dangerous people money. Shock of all shocks: She was secretly behind the robbery of Charles in the first place.

Rain survived the BBL. Everyone around her may not survive rain.

Rain recovers and wants revenge on the people behind the botched BBL that nearly killed her. With the help of a police officer, she tracks them down, and the confrontation ends with both culprits getting shot.

Then Rain causes an even bigger problem.

Sylvie has secretly started seeing Glen, a young man working around the Bellarie estate. Glen is Jules’s son. (What are the odds!) Rain walks in on Glen and Sylvie having sex, assumes Sylvie is being assaulted, and attacks him. Glen falls from a loft and ends up in a coma. He’s eventually declared brain-dead, and Jules removes him from life support.

This is very bad news for Kimmie because Jules already despises her and isn’t exactly known for processing grief through journaling. He becomes convinced Kimmie’s household knows more about Glen’s death than they’re saying. By the end of the season, he’s looking for answers and the feud has become deeply personal.

Somehow, angel is still alive.

Before leaving for Italy, Horace told Jules to kill the man Jules framed for Kimmie’s car theft, not realizing that man was Angel. Gunmen later ambush Angel at a bus stop, but he survives by playing dead and goes into hiding at Horace’s estate.

This gives him access to Horace’s money. So naturally, he shops. He parties. He spends. Horace, meanwhile, is never too sick to check his online banking. He notices the spending and cuts Angel off.

Norman finally learns who hit his wife.

For two seasons Norman has been hunting the person who ran over Ina, committing several additional murders along the way because grief apparently works differently in the Bellarie family.

Eventually, he learns the truth: Mallory was behind the original hit-and-run. And Norman, who’s been uniquely unstable since Episode 2, now has yet another reason to want everybody dead.

Season 2 ends with the most hostile board meeting in corporate history.

By the finale, Horace’s cancer treatment is working and he returns from Italy. He, Kimmie, and Mallory decide to cut the criminal rot out of Beauty in Black.

Kimmie calls an emergency board meeting. Everyone comes. And, immediately, the knives come out. Kimmie, Mallory, and Horace announce that they intend to take control of the company and remove the rest of the family because their murders, robberies, trafficking operations, shell companies, blackmail schemes, and general inability to go 48 hours without committing a felony have become something of a corporate-governance concern.

The family points out that Kimmie, Mallory, and Horace are hardly saints themselves. (True!) Unfortunately for them, Kimmie’s side has already made a deal. The FBI storms the office and arrests Roy, Charles, Olivia, Norman, and Jules. Horace reveals that he, Kimmie, and Mallory have turned over evidence and agreed to cooperate.

After two seasons of being underestimated by the Bellaries, Kimmie ends up sitting at the head of their company while half the family is led away by federal agents.

Homegirl went from stripper to fugitive to Mrs. Bellarie to COO to federal witness. LinkedIn does not have a setting for this career path.

So Where Does That Leave Everybody?

Kimmie is rich, powerful, married to Horace, and running Beauty in Black.

Mallory is done with Roy and temporarily allied with Kimmie, although Norman now knows she hit Ina.

Horace is alive, responding to treatment, and enjoying the rare pleasure of watching most of his relatives get arrested.

Roy, Charles, Olivia, Norman, and Jules are all in federal custody with various crimes, grudges, debts, dead lovers, dead wives, and dead sons hanging over them.

Rain is alive and carrying the secret of what really happened to Glen.

Angel is STILL alive. Miraculously.

Kimmie and Mallory, for the moment, are on the same side. Which should terrify absolutely everyone.

And this show? Still ridiculous.