Ryan Murphy’s latest melodrama The Beauty storms onto the screen as a gleefully excessive cocktail of body horror, camp, and conspiracy. It is gorgeous to look at and shamelessly deranged by design, the kind of show that sprints headlong into audacity and asks you to keep pace. Whether you roll your eyes or clap along likely depends on your tolerance for Murphy’s signature blend of operatic plotting and shock-and-awe spectacle.
A Maximalist Fever Dream That Mostly Works
The premise is pulpy gold: a designer virus dubbed “the Beauty” transforms carriers into camera-ready stunners, with a catch that turns the human body into a battlefield. In an opener that doubles as a manifesto, the series delivers a runway catastrophe so feverish it practically melts the screen, announcing a show that treats restraint as an enemy combatant. The tone swings confidently between grindhouse and glitter, welcoming both cackles and winces.
Murphy uses transformation set pieces like exclamation points—convulsions, subcutaneous ripples, and cocooned rebirths rendered with tactile, gloopy precision. There’s lineage here: echoes of Cronenberg’s nervy mutation cinema and the glossy rage of recent body-horror revivalists. If repetition threatens fatigue, the series counters with escalating mutations and clever emphasis shifts (teeth, nails, ribs) that keep the shock mechanics percussive rather than numbing.
Performances And Craft Supercharge The Chaos
The Beauty, surrounding a viral bombshell, gives Bella Hadid an unexpectedly ferocious showcase; it’s a physically committed turn that weaponizes her image while lampooning it. As law-enforcement foils, Evan Peters and Rebecca Hall ground the lunacy with weary, flinty chemistry, even when saddled with exposition. Ashton Kutcher leans into plutocratic villainy with a smirk sharpened to a blade, while Anthony Ramos revels in sleek, quippy menace. A perfectly cast Isabella Rossellini brings mordant glamour and a wink to the show’s mirror-maze of beauty myths.
On the technical front, the prosthetics and makeup teams operate at an awards-caliber clip: striated skin, viscous sheens, and anatomical sleights-of-hand that hold up under bright lights. Cinematography favors humid gloss and cold corporate sterility, toggling between fever and chill. Sound design does as much heavy lifting as the latex—bone pops and dermal tears arrive like jump-scare snares. It’s bravura craft in service of delirium.
Big Ideas on Beauty Are Mostly Skin Deep
The series wants to interrogate the marketplace of looks—how desirability is engineered, monetized, and weaponized. At its best, it sidesteps speeches and lands on lived-in vignettes: teens chasing clout, patients seeking life-saving or identity-affirming care, creators bargaining with their faces. Those beats feel plugged into reality; Pew Research Center reports that U.S. teens are immersed in visual platforms (YouTube reaches about 95% of teens, and roughly 46% say they’re online almost constantly), which is exactly the environment where a hotness superdrug would metastasize.
Elsewhere, the commentary can be blunt, mistaking terminology for insight. It flirts with incel/chad internet taxonomy, plastic-surgery debates, and influencer psychology without always finding new angles. The tension is deliberate but real: a show critiquing beauty fixation while luxuriating in it. Still, it occasionally lands honest punches. The National Institutes of Health estimates that body dysmorphic disorder affects around 2% of the population; The Beauty can feel like a glossy horror fable about that relentless inner editor, dialed past 11.
From Graphic Novel to the Expansive Murphy-Verse
Adapted from Jeremy Haun and Jason A. Hurley’s Image Comics series, The Beauty keeps the core hook but expands it into a Murphy-sized conspiracy: a billionaire puppeteer, weaponized desirability, and a biotech pipeline dressed like haute couture. The shift from noir procedural roots to jet-setting corporate thriller is the big swing. Purists may miss the comic’s leaner detective spine, but the translation understands TV math: amplify the hook, broaden the sandbox, cast big, and let the operatics roar.
The Verdict: An Alluring, Unhinged Spectacle Emerges
The Beauty is ridiculous in both the pejorative and the celebratory sense—a high-gloss carnival that mistakes excess for oxygen and often gets away with it. If you come for a surgical parable about beauty culture, you’ll find flashes of nuance surrounded by fireworks. If you come for fireworks, you’re in luck: the show regularly detonates, then struts through the smoke with a wicked grin.
Murphy loyalists who prize maximalist camp and immaculate craft will feast. Skeptics may still be won over by the audacity of the set pieces and a clutch of finely pitched performances. However you slice it, The Beauty is impossible to ignore—an alluring, unhinged spectacle that stares down our appetite for perfection and asks, with a wink, how much you’re willing to bleed for it.
The series streams via FX and Hulu with an initial batch of episodes, then settles into a weekly cadence. It’s designed to spark post-episode chatter, and odds are you’ll have plenty to talk about—and maybe a sudden urge to check a mirror.
