“Beauty is pain, my friend.”
There’s a line early on in The Beauty’s first season where a character exclaims, “Beautiful people don’t think that the rules apply to them.” It often feels like Ryan Murphy operates the same way with how he constructs a season of television.
The Beauty is a Ryan Murphy show, for better and for worse. There are mind-numbingly vapid scenes that are complete wastes of time and egregious excuses in vanity, but then there are brief bursts of brilliance that somehow pull you back in and leave you wanting to answer The Beauty’s “U up?” text even though you should know better. This is rather appropriate for a show that’s all about hollow perfection, succumbing to societal pressure, and taking the path of least resistance. The pilot’s cold open, which is a delirious action sequence that’s set to Prodigy’s “Firestarter,” is the most energized and activated that Murphy has been in a long time. It’s like his attempt at directing a Matthew Vaughn movie.
The Beauty is meant to accentuate how the beautiful elite are just as insecure as anyone else and even more prone to fixing their smallest imperfections. Instead, the series falls into some sort of uncanny valley as its ideas get lost somewhere in the middle. Characters recite monologues about the physical shortcomings that have plagued them throughout their lives, while they were subjected to rote nicknames, yet they all look like absolute smokeshows who have never existed in the same realm as imperfections. In many respects, Murphy is still circling the same drain that he was in 2003 with Nip/Tuck, even if The Beauty reaches grandiose places that would have been impossible in Murphy’s prior FX series.
The Beauty becomes a reflexive full-circle moment for Murphy that’s not just him riffing on his old work, but also his take on Black Hole meets The Substance, with a dash of Chuck Palahniuk nihilism thrown in for good measure. It’s a compelling cocktail to kick off The Beauty before the series is left stumbling down the catwalk to become fashion roadkill. The series acts like it’s destined to break the patterns that have dragged down Murphy’s other horror series, and for a moment, it even tricks the audience into believing this before it becomes clear that it has major television dysmorphia.
It adopts a scattershot storytelling approach in which many disparate lives are affected by a radical new treatment – which is actually a sexually-transmitted disease – that can rid people of their biological imperfections. The FBI are suddenly pulled into the matter when several models from around the world spontaneously combust after all proving to be carriers of the virus. Evan Peters and Rebecca Hall play Cooper Madsen and Jordan Bennett, two very Mulder and Scully-esque FBI agents – if Mulder and Scully were constantly having sex – who are sent around the world to investigate these odd deaths and the biological weapon that appears to be linked to these carriers.
The virus’s origins, proliferation, and commodification sustain 11 episodes. This turns into half-baked character studies from an ever-sprawling cast, glimpses into their chewed-up lives, and how The Beauty has changed them for better and for worse. The Beauty makes its point quite early in the season, only for this anthology-esque flair to grow increasingly repetitive and meandering over time. There’s one episode about a progeria patient that feels borderline manipulative and gross. This structure might have worked better if the series had just fully embraced this angle and functioned as an actual anthology where each episode presents a standalone story about someone who felt the need to succumb to The Beauty treatment.
To its credit, this series finds the perfect tone for this hyperbolized universe. Characters trade their prescription drug history like it’s salacious small talk on a first date. Combing through someone’s medical history is more compelling than digging into their sexual history. Genetic code chatter and hereditary hot goss’ have become analogous to flirting. Sex is reduced to a chemical breakdown that fulfills the physical body that has more to do with literal chemistry than sexual chemistry.
The Beauty also delivers on a body horror level, whether it’s the gooey full-on spontaneous combustions, skin sack expulsions, human flayings, or de-glovings. The practical effects are genuinely remarkable, and they’re sure to please any fans of David Cronenberg or body horror in general. There are some glorious, gross tricks on display here that pay homage to everything from Society, to The Fly, to Species. It’s gorgeous on a visual level with intentionally immaculate cinematography that’s designed to beautify, but it’s a series that’s coated in a wet, gross patina that’s increasingly felt over time.
The Beauty features many familiar faces from Murphy’s broader ensemble of actors, like John Carroll Lynch and Billy Eichner, while also pulling in some exciting talent like Isabella Rossellini, Vincent D’Onofrio, and Ashton Kutcher. If nothing else, it’s endlessly entertaining to watch actors like Rossellini, D’Onofrio, and Anthony Ramos fearlessly chew scenery and go for broke. An almost-unrecognizable Jon Jon Briones, who looks like he walked right off the set of Brazil, prepares an incel for his “Chad treatment” that literally leaves him looking like Handsome Squidward. There’s also an extremely gratuitous Death Becomes Her reference that will either delight or disgust viewers.
Evan Peters has been used to exhaustion in Murphy production, but his work here as Agent Cooper Madsen is actually a breath of fresh air and gives him something hefty to work with that’s not lost in five layers of fetishization. To be clear, that is still very much front and center in The Beauty, just not with Peters’ Agent Madsen. In fact, Madsen’s belief that “embracing imperfections can create something stronger and more beautiful than before” makes him one of The Beauty’s most interesting characters.
This is a series that treats confidence, true confidence and being self-assured, as some kind of superpower. It’s deeply satisfying to watch Peters operate on this side of The Beauty’s spectrum instead of any of the more strung out, exploding weirdos that he might have been slotted into the role of only a few years ago. That being said, there are less graceful moments in which his performance comes across as Twin Peaks’ Dale Cooper if he were more interested in freeing the nipple than Tibet.
The Beauty is ultimately a flashy, gross, overdone way of expressing the series’ central mantra that “beauty is pain” and other platitudes, but it’s a surprisingly entertaining experience that bottles something powerful and palpable that’s a scathing indictment of the world. Granted, it’s not as if the series is ahead of the curve in this respect. There are plenty of other projects that express the same ideas, just as effectively, in a more succinct manner.
There’s nothing new on display in The Beauty, a series that is destined to be denounced as “Ryan Murphy does The Substance.” While that’s very much true, there’s more going on here. However, The Beauty would hit a lot harder if it had come out five years earlier. It scratches the surface of some fascinating ideas, only to hurriedly abandon them in favor of giving audiences more of the same old slop.
The final act takes such a ridiculous turn that it transforms it into an almost completely different series. It becomes even more generic and begins to progressively erase what made the show remotely interesting in the first place. It’s such a baffling, frustrating decision that’s made considerably worse by the fact that it’s a direction that’s not present in Haun and Hurley’s source material.
The Beauty continues to recklessly discard its lead characters as it egregiously introduces hordes of random supporting players who may never be seen again. It’s such an irresponsible way to construct a season of television, which is perhaps not surprising for anyone who has seen a Ryan Murphy series. It’s still genuinely impressive how it grows more scattered and ineffective with each passing episode.
Murphy’s latest is one of 2026’s most gorgeous – and empty – pieces of television. It’s also a series that outright tells its audience, “Some stories have a shit ending,” as if to condition the public to expect style over substance and to accept inferiority. It’s a message that’s very much at odds with The Beauty’s garish ideals. It begins with promise and operates like an above-average Ryan Murphy series that’s later infected with the titular virus until it devolves into beautiful nothingness. There’s barely anything left to hold onto by the time that The Beauty’s first season reaches its end and metaphorically explodes in a bloody mess.
The Beauty airs January 21 at 9pm ET, with next-day airing on Hulu and new episodes airing weekly.
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