The Pitch: If you don’t live under a rock, chances are you’ve heard of Chippendales: the elegant, trailblazing first-ever all-male strip-tease troupe that has been bringing delightfully scandalous thrills to audiences since the 1970s. What you may not know, however, is that the burlesque’s history is brimming with conspiracy, racketeering, arson, and murder.
Over the course of 10 episodes, Welcome to Chippendales, Robert Siegel’s limited series based on K. Scot Macdonald and Patrick MontesDeOca’s 2014 literary exposée Deadly Dance: The Chippendales Murders, shrewdly examines and unravels the club’s shocking, harrowing history. The show rigorously dissects the troupe’s inception, rise to fame, and subsequent descent into the deepest, most gruesome bowels of corruption.
A Killer Strip Tease: One of the slightly miraculous things about Chippendales, which makes it stand out in the vast crowd of true-crime content, is that the show’s stranger-than-fiction crime plots almost feel secondary to its success. Indeed, even without the murders and the hitmen, the club’s origin story is undeniably a marvel in its own right.
Chippendales centers around Los Angeles-based Somen “Steve” Banerjee (Kumail Nanjiani), an Indian emigrant who is dead-set on chasing the American Dream until the bitter end. With savings from his gas station attendant job, he opens up a backgammon club, which gains no traction until he decides to turn it into the first-ever all-male strip-tease.
With the help of choreographer Nick De Noia (Murray Bartlett), accountant — and later Steve’s wife — Irene (Annaleigh Ashford), and costume designer Denise (Juliette Lewis), Chippendales quickly skyrockets to worldwide popularity. And even before corruption bleeds into the cracks of the beloved club, this success is a wildly compelling watch. Indeed, Chippendales takes the popular rags-to-riches format and squeezes every ounce of entertainment out of it.
A Magnetic Start: For its first couple of episodes, Siegel ensures that Chippendales has the electric energy needed to get viewers rooting for the success of Steve and Co. Montages of the club expanding in demand are cut together with nimble editing, which seamlessly allows Chippendales’ popularity to grow and grow and grow through dizzying whip pans and dissolve-cuts of growing crowds, until it feels like each scene is a balloon on the verge of popping. Further inspiring a thrill in these montages are sparkling earworm disco tracks that fill each moment with a buzzy sense of excitement.
Welcome to Chippendales (Hulu)
This same energy permeates almost every scene inside of the club: the Chippendales dance scenes are crammed with kinetic dancers, and sparkling, eye-grabbing costumes. But there’s much more to engage the viewer in Chippendales’ story than just its captivating aesthetic.
Indeed, Steve is an exemplary protagonist: An underdog character who is a breeze to empathize with in the first couple of episodes, Nanjiani embodies him with such a sense of determination and childlike wonder that it’s hard not to want to break into applause the first few times he succeeds.
Which makes it that much more devastating when Steve’s insatiable appetite for power takes over, and he transforms into a callous, tyrannical monster. Which wouldn’t be an issue, except for the fact that Siegel has already compelled us to want him to succeed, making the second half of Chippendales even more painful to watch.
Murder, Mayhem, and Men: Adding to Chippendales’ complications is the fact that Nick and Denise slowly become Steve’s sworn enemies — a switchup which, given the effort Siegel has gone to to endear us to all three of them, puts the viewer in a compromising position. Indeed, Nick and Denise are two of the best characters that recent TV has to offer, with Nick’s zest for life playing as utterly magnetic and seductive, and Lewis bringing her trademark wackiness and impeccable comedic timing to Denise, imbuing her with a frenzy to match Nick’s electric energy.
But just because the rivalry between Steve, Nick, and Denise complicates Chippendales to a high degree doesn’t mean that the show is any worse off for it. In fact, the series only increases in quality with every episode, culminating in a shocking bombshell of a finale.
Part of this has to do with the fact that Siegel does ramp up the psychological side of the show once violence takes the center stage, as opposed to just turning Chippendales into a gangster-style romp. When the first crime takes place, for example, it all happens off-screen, and all we see is a characters’ face when he receives the news. This forces the viewer to continue to connect the dots between a craving for power and brutal acts of violence — a connection that makes the bloody chain of events that follows that much more chilling.
The Verdict: In an era where it feels like true crime content is churned out by the second, it can be difficult to find a TV show in the subgenre that feels like more than just a bid to create easily-bingeable content. But Chippendales not only tells a worthwhile story, it takes it a step further and scrapes at the depths of its characters’ psychologies, revealing a meditation on good and bad that is anything but black and white.
Where to Watch: The first two episodes of Welcome to Chippendales premiere November 22nd on Hulu, with new episodes rolling out weekly on Tuesdays.
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