Netflix’s ‘Tiny Pretty Things’ Has the Last Wildly Bonkers Sex Scenes of 2020

Tiny Pretty Things recently danced into our Netflix queues to serve up insane ballet drama like we’ve never seen before. (Well, Starz’s Flesh and Bone came close.) The series follows Neveah Stroyer (Kylie Jefferson), a talented Black ballerina who earns a scholarship at a prestigious ballet school fractured over the murder of another ballerina. There’s intrigue and terror, and yeah, yeah, yeah, you just want to know about the sex scenes. And that makes sense. Tiny Pretty Things has some of the most outrageous sex scenes on Netflix, making it a late entry for the most unabashedly bonkers-level-of-horny show of 2020.

I tuned into Tiny Pretty Things late on Monday night hoping to find a ballet drama full of catty prima donnas and glorious dance sequences. Instead, the show was all that, and more. A mysterious masked figure pushes a ballerina off a building to her death, Lauren Holly struts through sets like she’s playing Norma Desmond in the haunted theater of her mind, and teen ballet students bone each other with cynical levels of dispassion. The sex scenes in Tiny Pretty Things stopped me in my tracks because they are so explicit, so vivid, and so perversely unromantic.

The first sex scene we get comes rather early in the first episode of Tiny Pretty Things. Bette (Casimere Jollette), an incredibly bitchy dance student, and her equally unlikable lover boy Oren (Barton Cowperthwaite) tear their bottoms off and tumble into a dorm room bed. Yes, just their bottoms. While most TV sex scenes focus on taking tops off or showing us relatively chaste shots of bare bums, Tiny Pretty Things cannonballs into their sex scenes by implying that there is nary a protective shield separating gonad from gonad.

I wasn’t turned on by all this, but rather I was alarmed for the actors. And then I reminded myself they are elite dancers, and that they probably choreographed everything to be safe and copacetic on set. And then I told myself, “Grow up, it’s not like you don’t know that every single show has an intimacy coordinator nowadays.” And then I thought, “Oh, no. What if Tiny Pretty Things doesn’t have an intimacy coordinator?” And then I spent the next 20 minutes trying to tell all the beautiful ballet boys apart until suddenly two of them were also in the throws of another jaw-droppingly nude sex scene. And then I gave up.

I soon realized that every single sex scene on this show was very much shot like a puzzle to unravel. The mystery? How were these scenes pulled off? You’ll see an actress — usually Jollette — remove her top. You can’t quite see anything scandalous, but nothing is left to the imagination. Elsewhere, heads approach groins, nude bodies tumble over each other and start scissoring, and full conversations unfold with nary a gasp for breath.

None of these scenes is romantic — they’re too dispassionate! — or even erotic. The sex scenes in Tiny Pretty Things are athletic. They are obnoxiously cold demonstrations of the actors’ pure physical ease with themselves and the dirty gymnastics they are asked to perform. This combination of such physical daring and stark emotional iciness results in something so unapologetically lurid, it begs to be commented up.

Tiny Pretty Things is a show about the dark underbelly of the seemingly perfect world of ballet. It’s about pain and cruelty and, most of all, the sacrifices ballet dancers make to achieve divinity through dance. It’s no wonder the sex scenes follow thematic suit. Tiny Pretty Things‘s sex scenes are ravenously focused on the physical stunt of a nude scene, and what’s sacrificed is the soul of true sensuality.

Watch Tiny Pretty Things on Netflix