Ryan Murphy’s shows and movies outside of the American Horror Story universe feel like properties designed for the digital information age, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. They feel engineered for an era of collapsing attention spans, built around viral moments instead of stories.
Of course, every media empire has to adhere to the viewing habits of their audience if they want to thrive or even survive, and Murphy has become the modern master of the viral TV show. FX’s The Beauty is a great example of a media consumption model. It’s like trying to make a loaf of bread out of a handful of really tasty crumbs.
The problem arises when you have to sit down and actually consume the thing from beginning to end. By the time you’re done, the whole thing just falls apart in your hands into a jumbling, inconsistent, bewildering mess.
This time, Murphy and his bleak sense of storytelling along with co-show creator Matthew Hodges take on the high-fashion world, a subject that he seemed destined to tackle after exploring the world of real and fictional villains like Nurse Ratched, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Ed Gein. After all, there are few industries seedier than one that treats its most valued employees as disposable pieces of meat on the most shallow of terms.
Murphy also throws in a heavy dose of international espionage with two FBI agents, Evan Peters (Cooper Madsen) and Jordan Bennett (Rebecca Hall), and corporate malfeasance overseen by a ruthless capitalist Byron Forst (Ashton Kutcher). However, the characters all seem like afterthoughts to the big moments built around the plotlines.
The titular “Beauty” refers to a serum delivered in the form of a sexually transmitted disease that turns people into model-grade hunks and babes, which may be the most Ryan Murphy story ever created for the big and small screen.
The series starts with one of the most action-packed openings ever to a Murphy property. Model Bella Hadid shows us the effects of the serum/STD as she goes on a violent rampage through a Paris fashion show and eventually the streets of the city. We learn early on that the stuff causes the body to overheat at an exponential rate, and God help anyone who gets in between them and an open toilet. Then, at the peak of the drug’s effect, the person explodes in a bloody, fleshy mess.
This leads to an investigation that introduces us to Agents Madsen and Bennett, who are partners with benefits. It’s bewildering the choice Murphy and Hodges make to introduce us to characters in this series. They don’t seem to be married or cheating on each other, but they talk about their sex and work partnership like two people who just learned some big words and are way too eager to use them. They come off as more reprehensible than interesting. We’re not sure if they’re someone we’re supposed to root for or not because they are mixing business with pleasure. They don’t seem to have any connection other than a badge or a bed. At least a “will they or won’t they?” plotline gives us a meaning to following their story, especially if something happens to one of them.
Their investigative skills are laughable. The agents are being briefed on this new outbreak, and they literally watch footage of a person exploding into a bloody mess in their car. They don’t put it together that this incident might be connected to the exploding (!!!) model they were just called in to investigate. Do exploding people happen more often than we realize in this universe, or did Kash Patel just hire these agents?
The show also follows the life of an ordinary incel named Jeremy (Jaquel Spivey) who is affected by this beauty-enhancing toxin or virus or whichever it inevitably decides it wants to be. He starts as a reprehensible, basement-dwelling troll who still lives at home and can only find happiness in self-pleasuring sex toys and OnlyFans channels. His story starts off promising as he gets plastic surgery to enhance his look and feels like we might get some wise commentary on the dangers of a society that swims in shallowness, but the decisions Murphy and Hodges make veer into purely shock territory as he turns the clinic who transformed him into an active shooter situation. By the time he transforms into the post-Beauty Jeremy (Jeremy Pope), there’s no reason to really care what happens to him.
It’s not even really clear what Kutcher is doing in this series other than to have a big star name to latch onto in the opening credits. He plays the head of a conglomerate that’s trying to make the Beauty a viable product, but he seems so detached from everything around him, as if he’s only there to spout ominous lines about how beautiful people think “the rules don’t apply to them.”
The Beauty feels like it doesn’t know what it’s supposed to be but will figure out something by the end of the run. It borrows heavily from David Cronenberg’s body-horror fascination and the far-superior film The Substance, but it learns nothing from either. Murphy’s earliest work on Nip/Tuck, the foundational FX drama upon which he built his television empire, had a clear message about the dangers of pursuing perfection and the price that must be paid to achieve. The Beauty feels like a first and very rough draft of that, and we’re only in the first season.
