The Cutprice Guignol

Ryan Murphy is one of those creators that I just can’t seem to learn my lesson about.

I’ve been covering Murphy’s shows since pretty much the start of this blog, and have deep-dived plenty of them in the process – from the impact and decline of American Horror Story to Glee (until it gets bad, at least) to Grotesquerie to the cavalcade of shows he put his name to like American Crime Story and Ratched, he’s someone I find perpetually interesting, if often predictably bad. His work, even when it lacks quality, has a distinctiveness to it – Murphy’s affection for camp, B-movie genre nonsense delivered through an exquisitely overqualified cast is unique, even if that is sometimes the best you can say about it.

And it’s that particular brand of Murphy-ness that tempted me to The Beauty, his most recent show for FX, which premiered a few days ago. Adapted from a comic of the same name by Jeremy Haun and Jason A. Hurley, The Beauty tangles a few plot threads surrounding the invention and distribution of a new virus that offers the user access to instant physical beauty. Cooper (Evan Peters) and Jordan (Rebecca Ferguson, mostly) travel to Europe to investigate mysterious and violent deaths related to the virus; Jeremy (Jaquel Spivey and Jeremy Pope, depending) infects himself with the virus in pursuit of the acceptance and status he craves, and the creator of the virus, Byron (Ashton Kutcher, unfortunately) commands his assassin (Anthony Ramos) to try and contain the spread so it can be monetized to its fullest extent.

And look, let’s not fool ourselves here: there are plenty of Murphisms on display in the three-part premier, and there’s no point pretending otherwise. Murphy (who wrote these episodes alongside Matthew Hodgson, a one-time staff writer on Glee) loves his ripped-from-the-headlines commentary, and we’re functioning about on the level of subtlety as Evan Peters smearing Cheetos on his face to imitate Trump in American Horror Story: Cult. JonJon Briones gets stuck with the worst of it, po-facedly quoting whatever looksmaxxing memes Murphy stumbled across on the internet as he was writing the script, while Spivey tries to pull off a character who is meant to be both a chronically online forum user and a person completely unaware of what an incel is. Ashton Kutcher’s Byron is buried under some of the clunkiest expository dialogue I’ve heard in ages, though it might just be that Kutcher is not up to the level of skill of the rest of the cast and it shows when he has to contend with the dodgier elements of the script; a stunt-cast Bella Hadid opens the show in a gruesome rampage in which she reads more as really specific perfume commercial than horror villain, and random celebrities like Meghan Trainor turn up to grind the flow to a halt and make headlines about their first acting credits (though calling it acting, at least in Trainor’s case, might be a bit of a stretch).

But, fundamentally, I actually think The Beauty is a good match for Murphy’s particular brand of television. The tongue-in-cheek nature of the premise – a virus that causes great physical beauty as passed through sexual contact – is exactly the kind of oversexed, ultra-violent nonsense that has been a standard of Murphy’s horror shows since Murder House. The balance of over-the-top rich-people glamour and juicy (and I mean that literally) body horror gives it a distinct visual identity oozing with show-off fun. Scene-to-scene, it’s somewhere between daft and camp, as people stumble around with prosthetics the size of a small nation stuck to their chins, while the central characters exchange pointedly arch dialogue about the nature of beauty and sexual desirability while they smoke a post-coital cigarette in a Paris hotel room. When people are combusting into bloody balls of goo in the middle of the Conde Nast dining room during an awkward conversation with their co-workers, it just defies being taken seriously, you know? Murphy is at his best when he’s having, fundamentally, A Bit of a Laugh, and if you need proof of that, The Beauty is it.

And, of course, with such a great cast assembled, there are some fantastic performances here to elevate it out of pure B-movie territory – the sweeping themes of beauty standards, desire, and status aren’t exactly subtle, but there’s plenty of interesting stuff to get into here. Anthony Ramos brings the damn house down as the assassin who swings between brutal and brilliantly cartoonish, a character that could so easily turn into outright parody that he keeps a firm, if one-eyed, grip on; Spivey and Pope as the two version of Jeremy pre- and post-beauty infection really deliver, elevating a man who could so easily have been a one-scene joke about the plight of the gooner into a genuinely compelling character laced with as much tragedy as he is villainy.

Of course, with Murphy’s history of flubbing the landing after a great set-up, I’m not exactly convinced that The Beauty will maintain this level of entertainment value or quality for the rest of this first season’s run – but perhaps with a pre-established story to go off in the form of the comic, I’ll be pleasantly surprised. What did you think of the first few episodes of The Beauty, and what are you hoping to see from the rest of the season to come? Let me know in the comments!

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(header image via FX)