The Prodigy’s “Firestarter” blares as a supermodel (Bella Hadid) in red leather wreaks havoc on a Parisian runway, snapping necks, battering paparazzi. She mounts a motorbike only to be T-boned by oncoming traffic – her own bone jutting through skin, then miraculously healing – before literally exploding in a shower of viscera as armed gendarmes close in. It’s propulsive Grand Guignol, and it’s how The Beauty – co-created by Nip/Tuck’s Ryan Murphy – announces itself.
Part body horror, part sci-fi conspiracy thriller, part allegory about beauty standards, the series is based on a 2015 comic book by American artists Jeremy Haun and Jason A Hurley. It centres on a drug that guarantees beauty (“one shot and you’re hot”) but is not without side-effects. Not only is this supposed elixir often lethal, it’s a sexually transmitted contagion – and since recipients become impossibly attractive, it spreads rapidly.
The show’s genetic make-up is spliced from superior stock. There are traces of The Substance, Coralie Fargeat’s scathing body horror, in the grotesque physical metamorphoses and the commentary on our beauty obsession. The contagion element is pure It Follows, the elevated 2014 horror in which intimate contact passes on a deadly curse. Not that The Beauty is a patch on either of them.
We enter this tawdry spectacle via Cooper Madsen (Evan Peters) and Jordan Bennett (Rebecca Hall), FBI agents investigating cases of hot people dying violently. Behind it all lurks a dastardly tech trillionaire, played by Ashton Kutcher, sufficiently alarmed by his miracle injection’s side-effects that he’s hired an assassin (Anthony Ramos) to manage the clean-up. As Byron Forst, Kutcher sacrifices menace for lip-smacking, scenery-chewing cartoon villainy.
No, not for The Beauty any scintilla of subtlety. More alarmingly, this Disney+ series (on FX in the US) is yet another example of a streamer dumbing down its output. Every narrative beat gets announced twice for viewers potentially distracted by their phones. Matt Damon recently revealed that Netflix now tells creators: “It wouldn’t be terrible if you reiterated the plot three or four times in the dialogue, because people are on their phones while they’re watching.” It’s hard not to think that’s what’s happened here.
Take an opening exchange between Madsen and Bennett, which establishes within minutes that they’re cosmetically enhanced, they’re sleeping together (“f***ing is helpful for jet lag”), they’re on their own “career paths”, and they want nothing “serious”. Moments later, Hall delivers the line “I sense a philosophical lecture coming on” – which naturally precedes one, complete with backstory about Madsen being “stationed in Japan a decade ago”.
Still, the series is an improvement on Murphy’s schlock-fest All’s Fair, the Kim Kardashian legal drama that one critic called “a crime against television” when it premiered in November. Murphy’s output, by and large, has been getting steadily worse since the time of The People v OJ Simpson (2016) or Feud: Bette and Joan (2017). Indeed, if all television were produced by him, as The Beauty very clearly is, our viewing diet would be restricted to the following: lurid premises, gorgeous casts, and capped-up exposition. As an exercise in excess, the show is flashy yet vacant, a farrago of sorts, eschewing narrative credibility for slick visuals and jet-set backdrops from Paris and Venice to Rome and Croatia.
Ah yes, those visuals. They are impressively gory, it must be said, as bodies undergo horrific, bone-crunching transformations. The first we witness involves a lonely incel (Jeremy Pope) whose teeth fall out as his face sloughs away and his entire form cocoons itself before bursting forth reborn: hotter, leaner, more chiselled.
For all its defects, The Beauty does have its moments. Unlike many of its characters, it’s comfortable in its skin, less concerned with substance than style, wearing its accessibility and ludicrousness on its sleeve. It’s TV, in other words, designed to be glanced at, but not necessarily watched. Other beauty products are available.
