Beauty Queens is a 2020 digital limited series available on iWantTFC, an online streaming platform owned and operated by ABS-CBN.
The show stars (actual Miss Universe 1969) Gloria Diaz as Dahlia De Veyra (née Rodriguez), Miss Universe 1969. To commemorate her late mother Tarsila Zamora I's 100th birthday, she invites her daughters Daisy, Tingting, and Rica to a formal dinner. The tensions among the family, particularly between her daughters and their manipulative matriarch, boil over.
Beauty Queens explores the way in which beauty pageantry can be and often is used as a key to general socioeconomic mobility and power in the Philippines, a stark contrast to their reputation in the West (i.e. beauty pageants are for rich, spoiled young women).
Its Ensemble Cast features other real-life beauty pageant titleholders as well: Maxine Medina (Miss Universe Philippines 2016) as Daisy and Winwyn Marquez (the very first — and only, thus far — Asian woman to win Reina Hispanoamericana back in 2017) as Tingting. Maris Racal also stars in Deliberately Monochrome flashbacks as Tarsila Zamora I, Ross Pesigan stars as Rica, and Lotlot de Leon stars as Beleaguered Assistant Precy. Joel Lamangan directs.
It has no relation to the novel Beauty Queens by Libba Bray.
Tropes present in Beauty Queens:
- Armored Closet Gay: Dahlia is ridiculously homophobic and transphobic. As it turns out, she and her trusted assistant Precy are romantically involved.
- Control Freak: Dahlia's vicarious ambitions are a double-edged sword. On one hand, she wants her (cisgender, at least) daughters to do as well in pageants as she used to do, and is even unhappy when Daisy "only" wins the second most prestigious title, Miss International. On the other, she refuses to relinquish the metaphorical crown of the household.
- Family Business: Dahlia wishes being a beauty pageant were this for the family. Daisy and Tingting are resistant; Dahlia is displeased with Rica joining at all, because she's trans and Dahlia can't accept that.
- Gold Digger:
- Dahlia to Fernan. She's also a lesbian, so she really never did love him.
- Dahlia thinks Hector, Rica's boyfriend, is this. But she's just projecting.
- Trans Tribulations: Rica is AMAB and faced with a homophobic (and later when she comes out as a trans woman) transphobic mother.
- Vicariously Ambitious: Dahlia is obsessed with upholding her mother's legacy of being a beauty queen.
