The Beauty Review: Glow-Up, Blow-Up

Everyone in Ryan Murphy’s The Beauty on FX is gorgeous, miserable, & violent, and somehow none of it adds up to a story worth caring about.

It’s also arriving with some baggage, because if you’ve seen The Substance, you’re going to spend at least the first episode going, “Wait… are we doing this again?”

FX’s The Beauty is absolutely going to invite those comparisons, no matter how much anyone involved wants to pretend it won’t. And honestly? Ashton Kutcher leaning into the connection publicly feels like an odd choice, because The Substance was such a specific, lightning-in-a-bottle cultural moment, and Demi Moore’s performance in it is the kind of career pivot people spend decades chasing. Anything that even lightly rhymes with that movie is going to get graded on a curve. And The Beauty… does not win that fight.

The setup is strong, though. Cooper Madsen (Evan Peters, Dahmer) and Jordan Bennett (Rebecca Hall, The Night House) are FBI agents sent to Paris after supermodels start dying in gruesome, headline-making ways. What they uncover is a sexually transmitted virus that turns “normal” people into flawless physical specimens, with a pretty major catch: it also kills you. Fast. Violently. Their investigation puts them in the path of Byron Forst, aka The Corporation (Kutcher, That ’70s Show), a tech billionaire who’s engineered this miracle drug and will happily burn the world down to protect it. He’s got a weapon on a leash too: The Assassin (Anthony Ramos, In the Heights), a walking panic attack in designer clothing. Meanwhile, Jeremy (Jeremy Pope, The Inspection) gets pulled into the chaos as the epidemic spreads across Paris, Venice, Rome, and New York. 

That all sounds delicious, right? High fashion, body horror, global conspiracy, rich people doing evil rich-people things. And yes, the show is decadent on the surface. It’s slick. It’s expensive-looking in the way Ryan Murphy projects always are, where even a hallway has a glow-up. But like a lot of his recent work, The Beauty is prettier than it is satisfying. The sheen is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

The biggest issue is that the storytelling feels like it has the attention span of someone scrolling TikTok while half-watching three other shows. Plotlines just… vanish. Sometimes an episode ends in a way that feels like it’s teeing up a cliffhanger, and then you don’t see those characters again for an episode or more. When you’re binging, it’s annoying. When this starts rolling out weekly, it’s going to feel borderline chaotic. There’s also shockingly little forward motion per episode. You don’t really learn anything new about “The Beauty” beyond the basics: you take it, you become hot, you explode. Rinse, repeat.

And then there’s the problem Murphy keeps running into lately: there’s no one to root for. Everyone is either a beauty-obsessed nightmare, or a grumpy, rumpled scowler who seems to hate their job, their body, their life, or all three. The cruelty level is also turned up so high, so often, that it stops feeling like a critique and starts feeling like the default setting. People abuse each other verbally and physically, and the show seems weirdly uninterested in consequences unless they’re gory enough to qualify as a set piece.

Performance-wise, it’s a real mixed bag. Peters is the closest thing the show has to a steady hand. He plays Cooper like a person who actually lives in the real world, which sounds like a low bar, but here it’s a gift. Hall is always making fascinating choices, and her decision to play Jordan as both hyper-competent and personally entangled is one of the stranger swings in her career. Their chemistry is… fine. Not electric, but just believable enough that you stop questioning it.

Pope might have the best overall balance of anyone. He understands the tone without turning his performance into a sketch, and when he’s paired with Ramos, you can feel the show briefly snap into focus. Ramos, however, is operating in a totally different universe. This isn’t scenery-chewing. This is scenery being chopped, blended, and served in a glass with a garnish. Sometimes it’s entertaining in a “what am I watching” way, but it also bulldozes tension the show desperately needs.

Kutcher has a few solid moments, mostly when he leans into the calm, soulless entitlement of a man who thinks he’s saving the world by monetizing it. And Isabella Rossellini (recently seen in Conclave) is genuinely fun as Franny Forst, Byron’s wife, especially because she carries the memory of Death Becomes Her with her like a little private joke. There’s even a sly visual nod that made me smile, which is more than I can say for a lot of this season.

Technically, the series should feel luxurious, but it weirdly doesn’t. According to the production credits, the first four episodes were shot by director of photography Jason McCormick, with Stanley Fernandez taking over from episodes 5–11, and Mac Quayle is on score duties (as expected for Murphy). The craft is competent, sometimes even stylish, but the overall vibe is strangely secondhand. Sets look reused. Locations feel like the most obvious postcard version of themselves. There’s a Venice stretch that plays like someone asked, “Where are movies shot in Venice?” and got handed a brochure. Even the makeup and effects, which should be the main event in a show like this, feel recycled from better projects.

And yes, the show is extremely interested in nudity, particularly male nudity, but it’s also weirdly chaste about it. Lots of backsides, lots of careful framing, and a persistent “Ken Doll” approach that feels less daring than it wants credit for. It’s The Beauty in a nutshell: willing to flash you something shiny, but never willing to go all the way with the idea.

Murphy has said the series is meant as a commentary on rapid transformation culture, and you can feel that intention in the premise. But intention isn’t execution, and this season doesn’t land the satirical bite or emotional punch it’s reaching for. There are flickers of wit, little hints of a sharper show hiding inside, but The Beauty gets pretty ugly fast and never really finds its face again.

If you’re coming for glossy horror, famous faces, and the occasional “what the hell was that?” moment, you’ll get what you need. If you’re hoping for something as smart, nasty, and unforgettable as The Substance, this one’s going to feel like a knockoff that costs a fortune.

The three-episode season premiere of The Beauty are now available to stream on Hulu, FX, and Disney Plus. The rest of the episodes will be released weekly, with the finale airing on March 4.