The Beauty review: Ryan Murphy does The Substance with a lot more surface

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Published 29 minutes ago

It lightly adapts a 2015 comic — but most of its substance is borrowed from The Substance

Anthony Ramos as The Assassin, a man in a shiny leather jacket and silver eyepatch, in The Beauty

If you’re feeling generous, you might suspect that The Beauty creator-producer-screenwriters Ryan Murphy and Matthew Hodgson watched The Substance and said, “The idea of an instant-hotness drug with terrible consequences as a window into commentary on consumerism and artificial ideas of beauty, all seen through a grotesque body-horror lens — that’s pretty fabulous. How could we expand on those ideas and heighten them in a TV-length story?”

If you’re feeling cynical, you might suspect they watched The Substance, noticed how much time its stars, Margaret Qualley and Demi Moore, spent naked, and said, “We need some of that! But more — like, a lot more!”

“The Substance, but a lot more” is a fairly accurate logline for FX’s The Beauty, a delirious, guiltily addictive fever dream of a show that’s simultaneously selling the fantasy of youthful, muscular, attention-drawing bodies, and offering up a scoldy horror-story message about the costs of vanity and obsessing over physical perfection. Technically, the show adapts Jason A. Hurley and Jeremy Haun’s Image Comics title The Beauty, launched in 2015. But it only loosely draws a few characters and the broad concept from that comic. The visual and narrative approach is much closer to Coralie Fargeat’s Oscar-winning film, from the dramatic screen-filling titles (city names rather than “MONSTRO ELISASUE,” but still remarkably similar) to the Alien-flavored horror images that pointedly mix attraction and repulsion in the same package.

Hurley and Haun’s The Beauty centers on a sexually transmitted disease of unknown origin that gives people “perfect skin, flawless features, and a gorgeous body” overnight. Two years after its appearance, half of American’s population has contracted it, deliberately or not. Then people with “The Beauty,” as it’s called, start to spontaneously combust, and a conspiracy emerges to take advantage of the victims.

Murphy and Hodgson’s version of the story dramatically reshapes those ideas and pushes them to often hilariously lurid extremes. Their version of the body-altering STD is still a closely guarded secret, rather than a worldwide event, but as it starts to spread, character after character endures a slimy, goop-centric Substance-style chrysalis metamorphosis. Again and again, the creators zoom in on naked actors slowly stretching and contorting through extended, nauseatingly sticky, lovingly shot “hatching” sequences. The show’s version of Beauty-related fatalities is similarly much more graphic — and much more splatterific.

The show does have its quieter side. FBI agents Cooper Madsen (Evan Peters, from Murphy’s Pose, Monster, and more than a hundred episodes of American Horror Story) and Jordan Bennett (Rebecca Hall) wind up on a globehopping case, trying to figure out why a handful of glossy, attractive people have run amuck, attacking and killing everyone they can reach, then exploding in a welter of gore. But the agents also pursue a sweet, awkward romance, with both participants trying to pretend they’re just casual FBI-partners-with-benefits, while denying their real feelings for each other. For TV fans in the know, their affair feels like a loving script-flip on the nearly eternal will-they-won’t-they of X-Files agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. Cooper and Jordan start the series as established bedmates — but whether they can admit they care about each other is another question.

A woman with long, wet, wavy hair, wearing tight red leather pants, a matching bandeau, and an open red jacket, snarls and looks feral in The Beauty

It takes Murphy and Hodgson a while to fully connect the dots between The Beauty’s slowly growing epidemic of exploding hot people and characters like Jeremy (Jeremy Pope), a depressed, obese, angrily self-pitying incel living with his mother; or “The Assassin” (Anthony Ramos), an ebullient, torture-hungry contract killer. But the creators waste no time at all before diving into the story’s trashiest, most gleefully exploitative elements. The opening sequence has a supermodel in a practically-painted-on red leather ensemble leaving a Parisian runway to assault the audience, snapping necks and flinging bodies around, then tearing off on a wild motorcycle chase set to screaming, aggressive electronic music. Barely five minutes into the series, Murphy and Hodgson manage to tag sex, violence, horror-movie body mutilation, a breathless action sequence, and a climax that seems designed to remind viewers of The Substance’s signature theater-o’-blood sequence.

That maximalist mentality extends throughout the series in ways that will be familiar to fans of other Ryan Murphy shows, from Glee’s performatively over-the-top teen emotions to Scream Queens and American Horror Story’s transgression-centric horror plots. Many of The Beauty’s performances are startlingly big and loud, particularly Ashton Kutcher as billionaire Byron Forst, a pharma-bro type who proclaims his villainy in every scene, whether he’s scheming to profit from the spread of the Beauty epidemic, or getting a blowjob on his yacht while simultaneously berating an employee on the phone. Jordan and Cooper are allowed their quiet, more personal moments, but the rest of the show is punctuated by every sensationalist element Murphy and Hodgson can cram onto the screen: acrobatic sex acts, hideously skinned corpses, extended run-and-gun battles, and more nudity than a Game of Thrones bordello scene, often as a bonus feature mixed in with all of the above.

The Beauty is consciously trashy, to the point of being unquestionably silly. If the leering sex-and-slime hatching sequences weren’t enough to make the point, it should be clear from the musical montage where Byron dances and whirls through his life of luxury to the tune of Tame Impala’s “Dracula,” or from his habit of saying all the quiet parts out loud, delivering clumsy hunks of dialogue about his customers’ willingness to do anything for beauty, and how much he stands to profit from their shallowness and hunger for acceptance. (As “eat the rich” fantasy stories go, The Beauty starts 2026 off with a memorable bang. And a lot of memorable banging.)

FBI agents Cooper and Jordan (Evan Peters and Rebecca Hall) show their IDs at a security desk in a shockingly mundane press image from the mostly pretty lurid TV show The Beauty

But while none of this can be taken seriously as an insightful moral story or cautionary tale about any of the topics it’s tagging — from the shallowness of beauty obsessions to pharmaceutical companies’ endless willingness to exploit people’s vanity, anxiety, and self-loathing — The Beauty is still surprisingly addictive. Some of the appeal comes from the unknowns, as the connections between characters unfold in surprising ways, and the backstory of the beauty epidemic emerges. Some of it is from the weird left-field choices that only someone with Murphy’s connections could pull off, like Isabella Rossellini showing up in a small role that seems inspired by Demi Moore’s particular positioning as an aging beauty icon in The Substance.

There’s also an inherent appeal in the characters here, all broad, familiar archetypes with tiny, entertaining tweaks that make them feel fresh. Peters and Hill bring a vulnerability to their characters that’s a lot more interesting than their generic procedural work on their case. Ramos is a particular standout, as a personable assassin packed with such unlikely tics and triggers that his moves are unpredictable. His extended lecture about Christopher Cross’ career owes a great deal to Patrick Bateman’s pop-music rants in American Psycho, but it still underlines The Beauty’s points about the shameful importance of attractiveness in American society better than most of the more blatant exposition on the subject.

But really, a lot of The Beauty’s draw is Murphy and Hodgson’s absolute go-for-broke shamelessness. This show is unequivocally pandering to the audience: The Substance has its own gross-out, go-for-broke verve, but The Beauty’s creators attempt to top it at every turn, with more skin, more slime, more sleaze, more sex, and more violence. At the same time, they constantly wink at the audience, reminding us that none of this is meant to feel particularly deep or moving. Nothing about the horror here is scary, and virtually none of the sexual content is sexy. The show feels more like a satire of every genre it touches than an authentic attempt to tap into any of them.

That dynamic could feel glib, inauthentic, and toxic if the show wasn’t such a full-bore-committed sensationalist sugar rush. There’s a prurient glee in any finger-waggling horror story where a slasher stalks and slaughters young, attractive, sexually active people, effectively punishing them for being enviable. The Beauty accelerates, exaggerates, and compresses that idea, while sprinkling it with enough irony to evade responsibility for its broad messages about how maybe looking like an underwear model isn’t the be-all and end-all of life. The Substance is smarter, sharper, and more startling, but in The Beauty, everyone seems to be having a lot more viscous, sticky fun.

The first three episodes of The Beauty premiere on FX and Hulu at 9 p.m. ET. The rest of the 11-episode season releases on Wednesdays, with one episode per week from Jan. 28 to Feb. 18, and two episodes each on Feb. 25 and March 4.

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