TV Series Review
Beauty is pain.
Or so the saying goes. It’s why people go from one fad diet to the next, why they spend hundreds of hours at the gym and thousands of dollars at the plastic surgeon’s office. They inject themselves with weight-loss drugs and steroids. And then they paint their faces with makeup and don shoes that hurt to walk in.
And even after all of that, many still don’t feel beautiful. They believe, deep down, under the makeup and plastic surgery, they’re still who they were before. They know that some people—an infinitesimal percentage of the world’s population—don’t have to do any of that to be attractive. They’re simply born beautiful. And some are not.
But no more.
Because now there’s a drug that people can take—a one-time procedure—to become beautiful. No more starving yourself or exhausting yourself at the gym. No more daily injections or bone-breaking (sometimes literally) surgeries. You will have your long-sought-after beauty.
There’s just one catch: You might also spontaneously combust.
Too Hot to Handle
When international supermodels start inexplicably exploding, FBI agents Cooper Madsen and Jordan Bennett are sent to Europe to investigate. Besides their profession and similar manner of death, there’s seemingly no connection between the three people (two women and one man) who have died.
But then the partners discover a third link: Just two years ago, none of these victims were supermodels. In fact, they weren’t even considered attractive. They were just average folks going about their ordinary lives.
Cooper and Jordan learn that the models were infected with a virus. The virus makes people drop-dead gorgeous. Unfortunately, it also makes them drop dead.
As the agents try to contain the epidemic and track down its source, the creator of the virus tries to do the same.
The Corporation created the Beauty drug years ago to reverse the effects of aging. It was successful: The CEO regained his youth and beauty. And he began sharing it with a select clientele.
But the drug had some unstable side effects: While the lab samples taken by the CEO and his cohorts are stable, the Beauty can also be spread like a virus via bodily fluid (read: sex). And in that form, it’s incredibly volatile, causing the aforementioned spontaneous combustion within just two years.
Cooper and Jordan want the virus contained to save lives. The Corporation wants it contained so that it can be commodified. And the Corporation is perfectly willing to take even more lives, even hiring an assassin, to achieve that end.
So when Jordan gets infected with the Beauty after a one-night stand, it becomes a race to track down her sexual partner—and his sexual partner before her, and that person’s sexual partner before that—before the Assassin does. Because once the trail runs dry and the virus becomes contained, the Corporation wins. Nobody will be able to prove the Corporation was culpable in causing the epidemic or the gruesome deaths that followed.
The Ghastly
Ryan Murphy may have once been the mind behind Fox’s Glee, a show about high school show choir, but he’s also the mind behind American Horror Story. And FX’s The Beauty is more in that latter ilk.
The Beauty is inherently violent and gory. The first sequence of scenes features a supermodel going absolutely feral at a fashion show, tearing herself apart and attacking bystanders before exploding in a shower of body parts and blood.
That spontaneous combustion is brought back again and again throughout the show. But there’s also the Assassin. He doesn’t just kill for the Corporation: He delights in killing. And when one of his targets displays the same murderous pleasures, rather than murdering the guy, he recruits him.
The Beauty virus is primarily spread through sex—and there’s certainly a tongue-in-cheek message there about sexually transmitted diseases. However, that doesn’t stop any of the show’s characters from hopping in bed together. Critical anatomy is often hidden by strategically placed limbs, but there isn’t really much left to the imagination.
Nudity shows up elsewhere, too, but often in gruesome, unseemly ways. After getting infected with the Beauty virus, people go through a literal metamorphosis. Their limbs contort. Their bones crack. They spit out teeth and cough up blood. Then they shed their skins and emerge from goopy cocoons, completely transformed.
Given all those content concerns, it’s probably no surprise that foul language is a common feature. There are references to and depictions of extramarital affairs, “incels” (involuntary celibates), masturbation, prostitution, disordered eating behaviors, plastic surgery, war and more. We also see a few LGBT characters.
And, considering it’s the whole theme of the show, we also hear a lot of chatter about the world’s obsession with beauty and sex—particularly the correlation between the two. As Ashton Kutcher’s Byron Forst, head of the Corporation, puts it: “Instant gratification at all costs.”
The Beauty will certainly make its viewers think—about beauty, about vanity—but with so much ghastliness, there won’t be much gratification at all.
(Editor’s Note: Plugged In is rarely able to watch every episode of a given series for review. As such, there’s always a chance that you might see a problem that we didn’t. If you notice content that you feel should be included in our review, send us an email at letters@pluggedin.com, or contact us via Facebook or Instagram, and be sure to let us know the episode number, title and season so that we can check it out.)
