The TV series Beauty and the Bester examines the 2023 prison escape of Thabo Bester — a convicted murderer and rapist who had spent years cultivating a public persona as an entrepreneur and life coach from inside a South African facility — and the woman at the center of the story, Dr. Nandipha Magudumana, whose relationship with him became the subject of national controversy. The docuseries is less interested in the mechanics of the escape than in the question of how Bester constructed and maintained his image, and how that image created the conditions for what followed.
The story is genuinely wild in ways that a docuseries can barely contain, and the series is at its most interesting when it’s examining the role of social media and self-branding in how Bester operated. The loyalty question — what Magudumana knew, when she knew it, and what she was willing to do — sits at the center without ever being fully resolved, which is honest rather than evasive. Streaming on Netflix.
