Satirizing human vanity in 2026 is low-hanging fruit, and Ryan Murphy and Matt Hodgson’s playfully profane body-horror series The Beauty plucks it eagerly. And to the series’ credit, it puts elbow grease into the shine. In this FX show, great news arrives for the vapid and short-sighted: A scientifically engineered shot can transform people into the most gorgeous versions of themselves. Peak looks with a simple jab. What could go wrong?
The shot contains a disease dubbed “The Beauty,” and it makes people hot—too hot—triggering spontaneous explosions that leave a plume of red mist and sticky goo where a 10 used to be. Covering up the Beauty and its wild side effects (it’s a “fucked-up love child of HIV and rabies, but neither,” per John Carroll Lynch’s FBI honcho), is the primary concern of billionaire manbaby “The Corporation” (embodied quite capably by Ashton Kutcher). With his Bateman-flavored Assassin (Anthony Ramos) surgically managing this impending splatter epidemic, he intends to monetize the jab on a scale that would make Novo Nordisk swoon.
How one entity gains exclusive control over such a disease is just one of the many questions The Beauty, which was adapted from the comics series by Jeremy Haun and Jason A. Hurley, takes its sweet time answering. The plotting is languid but never dull, content to luxuriate in chic aesthetic indulgences, pseudo-philosophical ramblings, and a hyperfixation on human anatomy that are punctuated with fawning shots of abs, clavicles, cheekbones, and derrières. Aware that their body-horror premise is loaded with endless social permutations, Murphy and Hodgson stroll us through the most obvious ones—plastic surgeons facing obsolescence, the aesthetically disadvantaged seeking illicit upgrades, bioengineers who manufacture the disease—with an unbothered confidence.
This haute-couture carnival ride kicks off with Murphy’s typical showmanship. We enter on fashion’s hottest new model (played by Bella Hadid) leaping from the runway to a violent spree across Paris, a motorcycle-riding Terminatrix who eventually ends up decorating the walls outside a posh restaurant with her innards. Investigating this random act of carnage are FBI agents Madsen (Evan Peters) and Bennett (Rebecca Hall), whose international assignments double as scenic backdrops to their bedtime debriefings and self-parodic thoughts concerning physical vanity, the fear of aging, and how few are above playing the game. (Bennett had her boobs done, while Madsen dwells on a suggestion that he get his teeth fixed.) “Everything we do is about sex,” Madsen says, with Peters wearing his implacable Dahmer face from Monster. “We go to the gym, we work on our bodies. Everything we do is about our universal, unquenchable thirst to all be attractive enough to get laid.”
It’s silly to accuse The Beauty of being glib about the topics at hand since wild gesticulation is its raison d’être (and the horror benefits). Visually, The Beauty shows Murphy, who directs several episodes, at his most stylish. But it’s hard not to clock thematic echoes to Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, with the show’s smoldering physicality and heightened reality making all this viscera look so clutch. Murphy and Hodgson, like Fargeat, seek to implicate the viewer in the brutal beauty standards they’re satirizing. Some characters are doomed and do not die well, yet we can’t look away. The violence is integral to its visceral and erotic pleasures, a balance Clive Barker struck more successfully decades ago with Hellraiser. And one thrusting, bone-bending transformation involves a contortion routine reminiscent of Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria remake. The Beauty wears its influences loudly. But given the material, it’s a good approach.
The series also sexes up the disease’s transformation process, taking the comics’ subtle overnight changes and turning them into a full-on Yuzna/Cronenbergian metamorphosis, complete with goop, flesh, and pod-people chrysalis. Given that this is a Ryan Murphy show, it’s sometimes comically difficult to suss out the Beauty’s haves and have nots. For instance, one character describes Madsen (who, remember, is played by Evan Peters) as having a face like a catcher’s mitt. Squint and the joke very nearly works as a fourth-wall-breaking suggestion that Hollywood beauty standards have run amok.
The pleasures of The Beauty are many despite its cloying grandiosity. Where else can you watch Isabella Rossellini dress down Ashton Kutcher with an insult like “clown boy,” delivered as if from a gilded balcony? It’s not all camp belligerence. Further into the season, the series peels back its prickly skin to expose the raw nerves underneath many of these deceptively awful people, like the mesmeric Jeremy (Jeremy Pope), a terminally online loner one disappointment away from homicide. The back half of the 11-episode season boasts engrossing performances that capture the vulnerability behind the desire to improve, introspection that positions The Beauty as a self-aware, EC Comics-coded cautionary tale about perceived imperfections and the emotional and physical chaos that they can invite.
A goofier surreality also creeps into The Beauty further into the season, particularly during a sequence where Kutcher’s character dances through a laboratory as technicians hustle around him in immaculate choreography set to Tame Impala’s “Dracula” to take his temperature, draw blood, and give him a lollipop for being such a good boy. It’s the frothier, more frivolous version that The Beauty could have easily become, an indulgence that teases the eye, pleases the ear, and adds little value other than to reiterate a thematic point that has been adequately expressed elsewhere: Corporations see the world as their playground and people as toys or staff who can facilitate play. Never mind that the sequence extends for a full three minutes, or that someone refers to this very rich guy as a vampire in the next scene. Clearly, there are few points Murphy and Hodgson aren’t willing to bludgeon into paste. And so what if they do? It makes a pretty mess. Besides, people watch shows like The Beauty for their looks, not their brains.
Jarrod Jones is a contributor to The A.V. Club. The Beauty premieres January 21 on FX.
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