Let’s be clear, right up top, that the age-defying, “hotness”-imposing wonder drug in Ryan Murphy’s latest FX provocation The Beauty is not The Substance. The Substance made a Margaret Qualley crawl out of your back and run around while you took a nice bathroom nap; The Beauty, as far as we can tell, just makes you look like a permanent Instagram filter—or maybe Ashton Kutcher—and is also some kind of biological zombie plague.
Still, it’s hard not to draw some parallels, even as the trailer for the upcoming show puts a lot more focus on the people creating the titular, uh, product, notably Kutcher, whose character is billed, irritatingly, only as “The Corporation.” (The Corporation apparently hangs out a lot with a very contemptuous Isabella Rossellini, in what we can only assume is low-key Death Becomes Her reference; meanwhile, we’re going to give the show the benefit of the doubt and not presume Kutcher was cast entirely because of his past connections with Demi Moore—although they’re certainly distracting.) When the new drug starts spreading like a virus, and turning people into some kind of ostensibly hot monsters, a pair of FBI agents (Evan Peters and Rebecca Hall) search for answers, while a character billed as The Assassin (played by Anthony Ramos, with a serious assist from a goofy metal eyepatch) goes around shooting people and threatening them with little hatchets.
If the general incoherence of the above description didn’t make it clear, this looks like an extremely Ryan Murphy-ass show, with Murphy, in this case, working with 9-1-1 and Glee alum Matthew Hodgson to crank up the chaos. Say what you like about it, it’s undeniably energetic, in that way that some of Murphy’s more deranged ideas are; Kutcher’s clearly having a pretty good time, preening in exotic locales and secretive superlabs and dropping lines like “It’s an STD that people will actually want.”
The Beauty debuts on FX and Hulu on Wednesday, January 21; the series co-stars Jeremy Pope, Bella Hadid, Ben Platt, Jessica Alexander, and Vincent D’Onofrio.
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