SERIES REVIEW – Ryan Murphy keeps moving as if every platform belongs to him, but The Beauty is the rare late-career swing that doesn’t implode under its own weight. A miracle injection promises perfection, then drags the viewer through body horror, social satire and procedural beats in the same breath. The hook is simple – an FBI duo chasing supermodel carnage – while the show uses that chase to needle our culture’s addiction to “better.” It’s not subtle and it’s not quiet, but it’s sharp, fast and occasionally more affecting than you’d expect.

Ryan Murphy doesn’t do downtime. One minute he’s on Netflix, using Ed Gein to side-eye the audience that gulps down lurid true-crime – the very appetite his brand has long fed. The next, he’s over at Hulu, bolting a roster of prestige actresses to one of the most famous women alive for a show that’s billed as legal drama and plays like hollow girlboss cosplay. In February, he’s even got Valentine’s Day covered with Love Story, an FX anthology of real romances that kicks off, recklessly, with JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy. And for his first FX swing of 2026, Murphy and co-creator Matthew Hodgson unveil The Beauty, a genre-hopping contraption that sounds like it should collapse – and, against recent Murphy form, actually holds.

Launching Jan. 21 with a two-episode premiere, the series leans on a hook that instantly recalls the darkly comic body-horror film The Substance, a scrappy 2024 Best Picture contender that landed Oscar nominations for director Coralie Fargeat and star Demi Moore. Its miracle biotech – “The Beauty” – triggers radical makeovers via a grotesque, flesh-cocoon process, rebooting the old, the sick, the ugly and the merely average into young, healthy stunners. Most showrunners would tiptoe around looking this similar to one of the loudest movies of the last few years, especially when their series is adapted from a decade-old comic by executive producer Jeremy Haun and Jason A. Hurley. But discretion has never been Murphy’s house style. So he casts Ashton Kutcher as the yassified mastermind: an actor-turned-venture-capitalist who’s as tabloid-famous for marrying a 42-year-old Moore at 27 as he is for anything on screen.

Maximalism, For Once, With a Brake Pedal

On paper, the The Substance–The Beauty, Kutcher-Moore echo feels like the kind of meta wink you can’t unsee. It doesn’t help that Moore popped up in Murphy’s orbit again with 2024’s Feud: Capote vs. the Swans. In practice, I stopped thinking about it a few episodes into this 11-installment run. That’s the upside of Murphy’s maximalism: very little gets the oxygen long enough to dominate. The downside, especially over the past decade, is burnout – a slapdash collage of camp, gloss, genre riffs, stunt casting and loud sociopolitical punchlines. The Beauty serves that whole buffet immediately, opening with Bella Hadid’s model tearing through Paris in a violent frenzy. The twist is that the mash-up is finally arranged into something tighter and more propulsive than Murphy’s recent norm. Instead of piling on one grotesque set piece after another, the show keeps pivoting tone and tempo, which makes the scripts feel nimble and largely spares us the déjà vu.

Even as the series keeps adding locales and side quests, its baseline setup is straightforward. Jordan Bennett (Rebecca Hall) and Cooper Madsen (Murphy mainstay Evan Peters) are FBI agents dispatched to Europe to probe a string of gruesome supermodel deaths. Who names an FBI agent Cooper – first or last – after Twin Peaks? Ryan Murphy, obviously. They’re partners and friends-with-benefits who’ve agreed romance is off the table, even if their worldviews don’t line up. He’s all about “embracing imperfections”; she’s forever chasing an upgrade, whether that means a pricier hotel room on assignment or breast implants. They matter more to each other than either wants to admit. In a show thick with Murphy’s trademark schadenfreude, and one that saves its best actors for the pockets that demand emotional realism, their bond is one of the few relationships that reads as genuine.

Two Agents, One Virus, No Room for Romance

As the case begins to point to an STI – the engine behind victims’ arc from schlumpy to hot to dead – the series reveals a more curated route to perfection. Kutcher plays the world’s richest man, who grandly calls himself The Corporation, and who develops “The Beauty” in open defiance of ethical, legal and medical guardrails. What starts as a beautification play becomes a full-body rewrite, rolling back aging and illness with ripple effects that touch everything from gender to disability. The illicit STI strain threatens The Corporation because it fuels a black market and because bootleg patients tend to die in revoltingly public ways. So he keeps a roaming hitman – Anthony Ramos’ The Assassin – on payroll to eliminate them before they can spread it. Murphy sketches The Corporation as a sociopath with barely disguised Elon Musk parallels, while The Assassin nerds out over Christopher Cross the way American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman worshipped Huey Lewis. He has lines like: “Billionaires don’t need friends. We have staff.” All that bluster and slime makes this the perfect Kutcher showcase.

If The Corporation were the hero, like the flat monsters Murphy has built whole franchises around, The Beauty would be a rough sit. Instead, borrowing the comic’s structure, the series doesn’t keep Kutcher or the FBI lovers in constant rotation. The procedural spine is less cat-and-mouse than a way to survey, with sharp psychology and exhilarating weirdness, a world reshaped by “The Beauty.” We get a surprisingly tender vignette about a trans scientist and her supportive lab partner, a pocket family melodrama where the parents of a profoundly ill girl face an unthinkable choice, and a mini teen soap that filters this absurd scenario through every tired afterschool-special convention.

Genre Soup That Somehow Tastes Good

The Beauty shape-shifts: part action thriller with a few genuinely slick fight beats, part sci-fi thought experiment, part body-horror freakout, part screwball romance, part Succession-on-steroids wealth satire. It plays like a lark – until it lands as a gut punch. It’s ridiculous – until it’s dead serious. One grisly incident, staged amid snarky fashion gossip in Condé Nast’s notorious cafeteria, threatens to upstage this spring’s The Devil Wears Prada sequel all by itself. Isabella Rossellini also arrives to chew scenery in the best way, delivering an operatic turn as The Corporation’s trophy wife turned scathing critic, with insights available only to someone who’s had beauty and then transcended it. On paper, she’s the closest the show comes to Moore’s position in The Substance. But her relationship to her aging body is less predictable, and her story sits as one data point in a wider matrix of people warped by a culture addicted to “beauty.” The pathology isn’t limited to older women.

The series almost never stays in one gear long enough to test patience. In place of subtlety – which Murphy reliably replaces with dialogue that names AIDS, Ozempic or the Sackler dynasty outright – we get brisk movement from metaphor to metaphor and a surprisingly coherent interplay among the show’s themes. As with FX’s not-quite-anthologies Atlanta and Reservation Dogs, the fun is in not knowing what each compact episode will pull out next.

Still, The Beauty doesn’t belong in the same exalted tier as those series – not remotely. Murphy and Hodgson, longtime collaborators who co-wrote every episode, throw a little too much “low-carb spaghetti” at the wall for all of it to stick. An early thread may be the laziest incel caricature ever committed to video. Once you learn the standard horrors that come with the baseline Beauty treatment, the long transformation sequences start to feel like reruns. The dialogue occasionally slides from bad-funny to simply bad. And in classic Hollywood fashion – a choice that undercuts this show’s themes in particular – the characters we’re told are plain are played by people who could headline a fragrance campaign. Evan Peters does not have “a face like a catcher’s mitt,” please be serious.

Not Subtle, Still Sharp

The Beauty wears its ideas on the surface, leaving little room for ambiguity or interpretive play. But it’s so watchable – and so of-the-moment without turning into a doom lecture – that it feels petty to ding it for not being a masterpiece. For once, Murphy comes off as smart without bothering to be subtle, and you start to wonder if he dosed himself with a professional version of “The Beauty” and, for a brief stretch, evolved into his ideal self as a TV-maker.

-Herpai Gergely „BadSector”-