Summary
The Beauty isn’t Ryan Murphy’s best work, but it’s certainly reminiscent of it, touching on many of his favourite subjects while hanging together as a largely coherent bit of body-horror that is a far cry in quality from his execrable All’s Fair.
You can never quite predict what Ryan Murphy is going to do next, and by extension, whether his latest project will be representative of his peak or impressively awful nonsense. Nothing ever really lands in between, which is how we can go from a confounding show like All’s Fair to a fairly straight-laced body-horror like The Beauty. Sure, there are a lot of shared themes between the two, and some casting choices in both that are unmistakable publicity stunts, but this 11-part FX/Hulu drama is, at the very least, a proper TV show.
This isn’t to say it’ll change your life or redefine the entertainment landscape. Let’s not get carried away. But it is recognisably effective as a story about ostensibly real people doing things that human beings might do, albeit under extremely exaggerated – arguably quite silly – circumstances. And that’ll do for me. It gives Murphy an excuse to indulge in practical – and some not-so-practical – effects, serve up heaps of legitimate nastiness, and make some sledgehammer-subtle comments about the state of the world, especially the bits of it revolving around archaic beauty standards, which, he argues, is probably most of it.
Based on a same-titled comic book by Jeremy Haun and Jason A. Hurley, The Beauty is a very obvious commentary on unrealistic beauty standards, the proliferation of quick-fix solutions like Ozempic and plastic surgery, and the perils of promiscuity, lifting an effective gimmick from indie darling It Follows by making the deadly disease it revolves around a sexually transmitted one. Two FBI agents, Cooper Madsen (Evan Peters, Agatha All Along, WandaVision) and Jordan Bennett (Rebecca Hall, The Studio, The Night House), are tasked with investigating a string of model fatalities dubbed by the press “Catwalk Carnage”, since the symptoms of infection include unquenchable thirst, violent outbursts, and eventually the sufferer outright exploding.
Our introduction to this pandemic, though, is through Bella Hadid breaking people’s necks at a fashion show, so there’s very much a layer of Murphy-isms over the underlying premise (Bella isn’t the only non-actor in this, either). It quickly becomes apparent that the exploding supermodels weren’t all that attractive before their infection, meaning that the disease makes people beautiful before it kills them. As far as disease vectors go, that’s a pretty potent one, since everyone has parts of their bodies they don’t like – the first conversation we see between Cooper and Jordan is about the latter’s recent boob job.
Some people are more susceptible than others, though. Someone like Jeremy (Jeremy Pope, eventually), an involuntary celibate living in his mother’s basement and lured by the pleasures of cam girls and angry MRA forums, is an easy mark for a plastic surgeon with a face like a Bo’ Selecta! mask who introduces him to the best version of himself, and then, when that isn’t good enough, a magical STD that turns him into the Chad he always wanted to be. It’s just a shame he doesn’t know about the exploding bit.
Unsurprisingly, the virus, which is technically a faulty pass-it-on version of an anti-ageing elixir, was invented by eccentric tech billionaire – aren’t they always up to something? – Byron Forst (Ashton Kutcher, That ’90s Show), who is either known as the Corporation or owns the Corporation – it’s honestly a little unclear – and employs a man known simply as the Assassin (Anthony Ramos, A House of Dynamite), whose job is to cover up the sudden chaos so as not to tank the value of the working fountain of youth product when it eventually goes to market.
None of this is going to change the world, but it might well come with a sigh of relief, given how bad and self-indulgent some of Murphy’s worst work can be. The Beauty is like a cross between Nip/Tuck and American Horror Story, in essence, but it takes some bold swings – there’s a massive one in only the second episode – that are worthy of respect, and it remains an eminently bingeable bit of genre swill throughout its run. That’s what we want from Ryan Murphy, or at least what I want, so for the most part, The Beauty performs precisely as advertised.
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