The Beauty Review: Ryan Murphy’s Gory Satire Is a Bloody, Entertaining Mess That Never Quite Looks in the Mirror

If you told me The Beauty—Ryan Murphy’s new FX dark comedy thriller—was meant to function as a grand summation of his television career, I would believe you. It is extravagant, uneven, provocative, shallow, intermittently thrilling, thematically confused, visually arresting, socially aware in fragments and frustratingly incurious about its own complicity in the very systems it critiques. In other words, it feels like Ryan Murphy distilled.

It is not, of course, his swan song. Murphy remains one of the most prolific figures in American television, with what feels like a dozen projects perpetually in development across FX, Netflix and beyond. But The Beauty plays like a full-circle moment anyway—a cumulative remix of Nip/Tuck, American Horror Story, Monster and Murphy’s long-standing fascination with bodies, trauma, celebrity and transgression.

Adapted by Murphy and longtime collaborator Matthew Hodgson from the graphic novel by Jeremy Haun and Jason A. Hurley, The Beauty is a body-horror satire about a miracle drug that makes people unimaginably attractive—and, occasionally, causes them to explode in showers of flesh, steam and fluorescent ooze. It is not subtle. It is not especially original. But it is often entertaining, sometimes genuinely unsettling, and almost always watchable.

The series’ thesis, such as it is, might be summarized as: Enjoy, but don’t think too hard.

A Spectacular, Unhinged Opening

Murphy has always understood the value of spectacle, and The Beauty opens with one of the most kinetic sequences of his directing career. At a Paris runway show, a model (Bella Hadid, in a self-aware cameo) exits the stage, attacks a woman for her water bottle, hijacks a motorcycle and tears through the city to the sound of The Prodigy’s “Firestarter.” The chase ends with police, gunfire—and the model exploding.

It is thrilling, absurd and brazenly indulgent. For a brief moment, The Beauty feels like the closest thing we may ever see to a Ryan Murphy–directed James Bond or Mission: Impossible film. The momentum is undeniable, the confidence intoxicating.

The problem is that The Beauty never quite matches that opening again.

The Plot: Hot or Explode-y

The explosion attracts the attention of FBI agents Madsen (Evan Peters) and Bennett (Rebecca Hall), partners both professionally and romantically. As similar incidents begin cropping up around the world, the agents trace the phenomenon to a mysterious pharmaceutical known as The Beauty—a drug that grants eternal youth, perfect skin, idealized bodies and social capital beyond imagination.

The drug’s creator and chief profiteer is an enigmatic billionaire (Ashton Kutcher), whose commitment to the product’s success includes hiring a ruthless assassin (Anthony Ramos) to eliminate inconvenient variables. The investigation leads Madsen and Bennett across Europe—from Paris to Rome to Venice—as they inch closer to a truth that may either kill them or transform them forever.

Adding to the show’s metaphorical ambitions is the revelation that The Beauty can be sexually transmitted, a narrative choice that drags the series into familiar territory: disease, desire, stigma and fear. Whether this functions as intentional AIDS allegory, general medical paranoia or merely another shocking wrinkle is left frustratingly ambiguous.

The Ryan Murphy Hall of Mirrors

The biggest issue with The Beauty is not that it borrows from other works—it’s that it borrows so heavily from Murphy’s own. The series feels like a collage of familiar obsessions: plastic surgery culture (Nip/Tuck), grotesque transformations (American Horror Story), moral panic (Monster), and the commodification of bodies.

Cinephiles will spot echoes of David Cronenberg (The Fly, Rabid), Death Becomes Her, Eyes Without a Face, and even last year’s The Substance. These influences are not inherently a problem—genre thrives on repetition and reinterpretation—but The Beauty rarely pushes these ideas into new terrain.

Instead, it scatters references like breadcrumbs, trusting viewers to assemble meaning where the series itself declines to commit.

A Show Full of Thoughts, But Few Conclusions

To its credit, The Beauty is one of Murphy’s more “thought-full” shows in recent years. It gestures toward contemporary anxieties about social media, pharmaceutical capitalism, Ozempic culture, post-pandemic vulnerability, wealth inequality and the monetization of insecurity.

But these ideas are introduced briefly, often name-checked rather than explored, then abandoned in favor of the next shock sequence. The result is a series that appears socially engaged without ever clarifying its stance.

This ambiguity can be generous—or careless. At times, The Beauty feels so noncommittal that it risks unintended readings, including a vague anti-vaccine or pharmaceutical-skeptical subtext that the series seems uninterested in interrogating or correcting.

Bodies, Beauty and Blind Spots

The central irony of The Beauty is that while it critiques society’s obsession with youth and attractiveness, it is populated almost exclusively by actors who look like Ryan Murphy archetypes: impossibly symmetrical faces, sculpted bodies, runway-ready cheekbones.

This raises a question the series never asks: Can a show so invested in aesthetic perfection meaningfully critique the harm of aesthetic perfection?

The answer, here, appears to be no.

Like Monster, The Beauty places moral responsibility squarely on audiences and systems, not creators. It empathizes with victims of beauty culture—those who feel inadequate, invisible or desperate—but never examines how television itself helps construct those ideals.

The critique always points outward. Never inward.

When The Beauty Actually Works

Ironically, The Beauty is strongest when it moves away from its glamorous leads and international espionage framework. The most compelling episodes are self-contained stories about “ordinary” people caught in the orbit of the drug.

One standout centers on two lab technicians (Eddie Kaye Thomas and Rev. Yolanda), one schlubby and one trans, navigating professional frustration and personal longing. The episode explores ambition, marginalization and desire with surprising nuance.

Another focuses on a teenage girl (Emma Halleen) whose insecurity blinds her to an otherwise decent life. It is one of the series’ few moments of genuine melancholy, where horror emerges not from exploding flesh but from quiet self-loathing.

By contrast, an early episode featuring Jaquel Spivey as an overweight incel pushed toward desperation is deeply uncomfortable—not because it challenges viewers, but because the series seems to relish his degradation without fully understanding what it’s doing. Spivey is excellent, but the show’s contempt for the character undercuts any claim to empathy.

Performances: Game, Glossy, Uneven

Evan Peters appears to be enjoying his turn as an action lead, brandishing a badge and throwing himself into fight choreography across picturesque European locales. He brings sincerity to a role that often feels thinly sketched.

Rebecca Hall is capable and grounded, but her character is saddled with the tired irony that even beautiful people can feel insecure—a notion the series treats as profound rather than obvious.

Anthony Ramos’ assassin is compelling at first but becomes repetitive until paired with Jeremy Pope, who gives arguably the most textured performance in the series, finding emotional depth beyond what the script provides.

Ashton Kutcher is perfectly smarmy as the billionaire villain, especially in scenes opposite Isabella Rossellini, whose presence evokes the genre history Murphy so loves. Yet Kutcher feels miscast in key ways that become clearer later in the season.

Murphy’s deep bench of regulars—John Carroll Lynch, Jon Jon Briones, Ari Graynor, Billy Eichner, Ben Platt—add texture, while dozens of hyper-attractive supporting players fulfill the show’s unspoken casting requirement: be hot.

Gore, Glorious Gore

Where The Beauty does not disappoint is in its effects. The body horror is plentiful, inventive and impressively executed. Skin peels, teeth are removed, fingernails detach, bodies rupture in showers of color.

None of it is especially new, but it is done well—and for casual viewers, it will shock plenty. Like The Substance, this is less about pushing genre boundaries than delivering visceral spectacle.

Final Verdict

The Beauty is messy, indulgent, provocative without being probing and entertaining without being enlightening. It spins its wheels, chases its tail and occasionally stumbles into something meaningful despite itself.

If you try to read it too closely, it collapses. If you accept it for what it is—a stylish, gross, idea-stuffed Ryan Murphy entertainment—it mostly delivers.

Just don’t expect it to look in the mirror for too long.

And don’t expect Ryan Murphy to slow down anytime soon.