‘The Beauty’ Review: Ryan Murphy’s Fun-Enough FX Satirical Body Horror

Were you to tell me that The Beauty, a new FX dark comedy, were Ryan Murphy‘s last TV series — a chaotic and inconsistent summation of a chaotic and inconsistent body of work — I would believe you. 

It isn’t. He’s got a dozen shows — probably more — at various stages in the pipeline. 

But The Beauty is affectionately cumulative, a frequently gross, occasionally provocative blend of Nip/Tuck and various American Horror Story iterations. 

Adapted by Murphy and longtime collaborator Matt Hodgson from the comic book by Jeremy Haun and Jason A. Hurley, the show is not merely derivative of Murphy’s own oeuvre. It will remind viewers with short memories of The Substance, especially since The Beauty co-stars Ashton Kutcher, ex-husband of that movie’s star, Demi Moore. It will remind slightly older viewers of Death Becomes Her, a movie that co-starred Isabella Rossellini, a recurring guest star in The Beauty. It will remind cinephiles of David Cronenberg’s bleakly satirical forays into body horror, especially The Fly and Rabid, as well as genre classics like Eyes Without a Face.

The series, which definitely does not complete its story in the 11-episode first season, is one of Murphy’s most thought-full (if not thoughtful) shows in years. It’s highly debatable how many of those thoughts are fresh or original or fully examined, but it’s a busy show that will keep many viewers occupied trying to make sense of its breadcrumb trail of familiar ideas and familiar twists and turns. My sense is that the trail leads to nothing revelatory, but at least you’re treated to plenty of exploding bodies, piles of steaming flesh and a writhing A-list cast along the way. 

The Beauty begins with one of the more thrilling sequences of Murphy’s directing career. A model (Bella Hadid) walks off the stage at a Paris runway show, attacks a woman for her bottle of water and engages in an adrenalized motorcycle chase through the City of Lights, accompanied by Prodigy’s “Firestarter,” leading to a showdown with police in which the model … explodes. This is as close as we’re ever likely to get to seeing what a Ryan Murphy-directed James Bond or Mission: Impossible movie would look like, so enjoy it.

The case attracts the attention of FBI agents Madsen (Evan Peters) and Bennett (Rebecca Hall), leading to the revelation that gorgeous people around the world are similarly spontaneously combusting. Madsen and Bennett, whose partnership also includes sleeping together, make their way to Rome and Venice as the stakes rise. They’re getting closer and closer to a truth that could get them killed, or transformed forever.

It all relates to a mystery drug known as The Beauty, which offers unimaginable physical attractiveness and … a variety of side effects. The promise of youth and vitality brings with it additional wealth for an enigmatic billionaire (Kutcher), who’s so committed to his product that he employs an enigmatic assassin (Anthony Ramos) to tie up loose ends.

How much would you pay to look like an actor from a Ryan Murphy show? What would you do to look like an actor from a Ryan Murphy show? And what to make of the added wrinkle that, in addition to its pure laboratory version, The Beauty can be sexually transmitted? How much credit do we give creators for utilizing an AIDS metaphor in 2026, 40 years after The Fly and 33 years after Abel Ferrara’s Body Snatchers?

With these as the central questions, there are more actors who look like actors from a Ryan Murphy show in The Beauty than in any previous Ryan Murphy show, with the titular drug offering a beauty that’s renewable and interchangeable, just like so many of the young stars in Ryan Murphy shows.

Some writers with Murphy’s body of work, then, would see a show like The Beauty as an opportunity for self-reflection and self-critique, but this has never been the thing that Ryan Murphy does best. Here, as in recent seasons of Netflix’s Monster, it’s actually the thing he does worst.

The Beauty is about the societal conditions that would make the drug in question so irresistible, updating the plastic surgery satire of Nip/Tuck to raise its eyebrow in the direction of social media, relentless advertising and youthful culture of bullying and peer pressure. But might this also be an opportunity for a show — in which every actor looks either like a model, constantly showing off their cheekbones and six-packs, or like John Carroll Lynch (guesting as the FBI agents’ boss) — to turn inward and examine how casting TV with this sort of omnivorous gaze might affect people who watch and mistake it for an idealized reality? 

Nope. Just as the Monster anthology is about the ghoulishness of viewers who devour true-crime trash but not about the responsibility of the artists saturating the entertainment landscape with content feeding that desire, The Beauty has many thoughts on what perpetuates our society’s beauty aspirations but none suggesting the problem is coming from inside the house. 

Like the Monster shows, The Beauty has empathy for the “victims” — the “normal” people who would be the consumer base for a super-drug of this sort — but that empathy is usually restricted to stand-alone episodes outside the main storyline. 

As fun as The Beauty can be when it’s about pretty FBI agents in international locations and gorgeous people ripping off their flesh, peeling off their fingernails and gingerly removing their teeth, the best episodes — many of which are admirably short, some under a half-hour, even — focus on ordinary people. 

An episode centered around a pair of lab technicians (Eddie Kaye Thomas and Rev. Yolanda), one schlumpy and one trans, raises some of the biggest and most fully realized themes in the series. Another centered on a teenage girl (Chloë Sevigny doppelgänger Emma Halleen), whose insecurities blind her to a life that is, on its surface, pretty good, finds a palpable sadness within the bedlam of the show. 

A less generous approach comes in the early episode featuring Broadway star Jaquel Spivey as an overweight incel pushed to desperation by online message boards. Spivey is exceptional, but the series’ leering contempt for his character is unsettling, and after establishing some distressing details, the character’s arc goes in a wildly different direction.

That’s what The Beauty (like too many lesser Ryan Murphy shows) does too often. The series features just enough acknowledgment of Ozempic, the lingering impact of COVID, the Sacklers, etc., to suggest how an examination of America’s obsession with beauty and youth (and pharmaceutical solutions to myriad problems) would be different in 2026 than in 2003, when Nip/Tuck premiered. But everything is so cursory as to make it very hard to tell what the storytellers think about anything. 

Throw out enough ideas without connecting the dots and the consequences can be unintended. I could make an argument that the show is somewhere between anti-vax or vaccine-skeptical, a message that I don’t think is intended but is absolutely there for anybody who wants to selectively interpret. 

Or you can just skip trying to “read” this text and accept that it’s about a drug that makes you either hot or explode-y. Nothing more, nothing less. 

The Beauty spins in circles, sometimes charging forward with the propulsion of an action movie, other times pausing to let actors wallow in on-the-nose conversations and a rhythmically contorting transformation ritual that might have been inspired by Alvin Ailey, but Ailey was saying specific things about Black bodies, and Murphy and his fellow directors (including Michael Uppendahl and Alexis Martin Woodall) only wish they were. 

Regardless, the effects are both disgusting and well-executed. There’s little in the discarded skin suits and ooze of infinite colors that fans of the genre haven’t seen before, but the same was true of The Substance, which, like The Beauty, was meant to shock casuals more than gorehounds.

Grounding the outlandishness of the series is a generally game cast. Peters is enjoying playing action star, flashing a badge and having martial arts-inspired fights in Italian locations, and he handles his half of the sincere love story effectively. Hall works as the other half, but too much of her character is based around the underwhelming irony that even beautiful people can have insecurities. Ramos’ assassin is stuck repeating the same sadistic beats until he’s paired with Jeremy Pope, who probably gives my favorite performance in the show for the depths he finds that go well beyond his dialogue. 

Kutcher has the perfect synthetic smarminess for a character willing to destroy the world to make himself richer, and he has good scenes bouncing opposite Rossellini, but he’s miscast for several key reasons that I can’t explain without spoilers. 

As always, Murphy has a deep bench of recurring ensemble players to call upon including favorites like Lynch, Jon Jon Briones, Ari Graynor, Billy Eichner and Ben Platt. And then there are around 50 actors whose major qualification is “hot” and whose performances range from “hot” to, well, “hot.” Enjoy the eye candy. Don’t worry about the lack of nuance. 

And don’t worry that Ryan Murphy is going away just because The Beauty feels like a full-circle moment, if far from a pinnacle. There are still plenty of American horror, love and crime stories, plenty of hunky serial killers and plenty of showcases for hot stars that won’t require an internal ethical audit.