The Beauty — High-style trash in a filter-obsessed future

If you take a step back from our everyday, you realise we’re actually living in a sci-fi future. Ignoring the AI elephant in the room, and focusing only on the human race, things are looking up. Global life expectancy has more than doubled since the 1900s. If we’re not trying to survive in a warzone, we’re around longer than ever, and thanks to advances in nutrition, supplements and aesthetic medicine, humans are looking better than ever. Forty is the new thirty and all that.

That reality, combined with the social media age, has heightened the obsession with appearance, and we’ve now entered an era where the monied and privileged can get a dose of beauty in a needle – whether it’s fillers, Botox or Ozempic. No surgery required.

This backdrop immediately injects new FX series The Beauty (streaming in South Africa on Disney+) with extra relevance, yet this uneven series only flashes its sharp commentary scalpel intermittently.

Based on the comic series of the same name by Jeremy Haun and Jason A Hurley – not that it’s ever credited – The Beauty as a TV series is co-created and co-written by Glee’s Ryan Murphy and Matthew Hodgson, with the prolific Murphy notably also responsible for Nip/Tuck, American Horror Story, Netflix’s Monster and, most recently, the critically panned Kim Kardashian starrer All’s Fair.

Part science fiction, part body horror, and part raunchy sex thriller, The Beauty kicks off with a model (Bella Hadid) fleeing a Paris runway show. Sent mad with thirst and literal searing pain, she rampages across Paris, demonstrating superhuman strength and other gruesome abilities, before exploding as a result of spontaneous combustion. It’s possible to be too hot, you see.

Enter FBI agents Cooper Madsen (Evan Peters) and Jordan Bennett (Rebecca Hall), who begin their investigation suspecting a terrorist attack before uncovering a bizarre pharmaceutical conspiracy. About to launch with the funding of Ashton Kutcher’s tech billionaire, Byron Forst (AKA The Corporation), is a new drug that transforms people at a genetic level.

They receive new bodies that sit at the peak of physical perfection. Unsurprisingly, though, there are side effects, with the most disturbing being the ability of drug takers to pass on a far more unstable version of “the Beauty” through unprotected sex and other bodily secretions. Forst can’t have a faulty bootleg version competing with his trademarked product (and its endless boosters), leading him to dispatch Anthony Ramos’s Assassin to sever all loose ends.

If you already have questions – like why are FBI agents scuttling around the globe, and why is one of them British? – it only gets worse from here. The Beauty is a wildly inconsistent series, which reflects even in episode length, ranging from 24 minutes right up to a traditional hour-long instalment. The 11-part first season can’t decide what it wants to be, or even really what it wants to say.

Supposed to be the emotional foundation of The Beauty, relentlessly earnest Cooper and Jordan are trapped in a long-running situationship, unable to admit their true feelings for one another. Meanwhile, Ramos’ assassin, with a silly metal eye patch, wardrobe of leather coats, and fondness for torturing people to Christopher Cross, brings unhinged levity to proceedings.

Even Kutcher’s Forst is a moustache-twirling villain one episode, taunting haute couture-attired wife Franny (Isabella Rossellini) about her aged appearance, before demonstrating remorsefulness and social responsibility the next. As for the show’s sexual content, The Beauty is one of those strangely bipolar projects with plenty of buttocks shots, simulated thrusting, loud orgasms and explicit dialogue, but the women are always wearing a bra in bed.

All this said, inconsistent doesn’t mean boring. As wild and messy as it is, The Beauty flings out enough bait to hook viewers, even if they’re rarely satisfied with the result of their reeling in.

When the series leans into the body horror of its transformations, using makeup, prosthetics and practical effects to convincing effect, it’s chilling. The opening credits alone are stomach churning. The show also demonstrates a lot of flair in the cinematography department, while the action scenes are surprisingly good, with crunchy hand-to-hand combat choreographed to minute detail.

Overall, The Beauty is stronger when it veers away from its wobbly primary narrative and characters to function more like an anthology series. In these dedicated episodes, we’re introduced to different people tempted to take the Beauty and why, from frustrated, rejected incels to high schoolers worn down by peer pressure and a hunger for Instagram likes.

Much as Nip/Tuck did back in the day, The Beauty grabs water cooler hypotheticals and runs with them, refusing to flinch while exploring extreme situations. What would happen to a progeria sufferer? What would the Beauty do to someone in the process of medically transitioning? Is it always bad to pursue physical perfection?

The Beauty is rarely not interesting. However, it repeatedly squanders its thought-provoking set-up with sensationalist and shocking executions, which you can expect from a Murphy series. The waste even extends to its high-profile cast, which includes Vincent D’Onofrio, Ben Platt, Meghan Trainor and Peter Gallagher.

The nature of the Beauty means that as soon as their characters are exposed to Forst’s drug, the stars are replaced by pretty young model-actors, many of whom lack the thespian skills of their part sharers. So if you’re watching for these familiar faces, be aware that they won’t be around for long, and their substitutes are just there to look beautiful.

Combined with a cheeky cliff-hanger ending, The Beauty’s final impression is one of preposterous, high-style trash. Intermittently entertaining trash, but skin deep in comparison to what it could have been. DM

The Beauty is on Disney+, having premiered on 21 January with three episodes. The series runs through to 4 March with weekly episode drops.

This review was first published on Pfangirl and is based on the full first season of The Beauty, with early access supplied by Disney+.