March 7, 2026
STREAMING REVIEW:
Hulu;
Horror;
TV-MA.
Stars Evan Peters, Anthony Ramos, Jeremy Pope, Rebecca Hall, Ashton Kutcher.
Ryan Murphy’s “The Beauty,” a series streaming on Hulu, feels less like a traditional thriller and more like a feverish, unsettled nightmare. It’s a dark exploration of what happens when a villain gains total control over the world’s most powerful pharmaceutical provider in our current tech-driven age. The show is based on the unrestrained creator-owned comic book series of the same name, written by Jeremy Haun and Jason A. Hurley and published by Image Comics starting in 2015. While Murphy and his co-creator, Matthew Hodgson, adapted the story for television, they took significant creative liberties with the source material to force it into a serialized, modern-day thriller format.
The premise is grim: A virus acts as a shortcut to physical perfection, but it carries a fatal catch. Eventually, your internal temperature hits a breaking point, and you spontaneously combust. Yeah, of course! Built on a contradiction, the pursuit of an impossible image becomes the very thing that consumes the host. As Byron Forst, the villain played by Ashton Kutcher, puts it: “Ugly is the only remaining terminal illness.”
This isn’t some distant sci-fi; it’s set right here in the relatable modern day, amid our circus-like, unpredictable political climate. By grounding the story in our world of influencers and weight-loss drugs, the show highlights how easily an “optimized” society could fall apart if beauty were a commodity you could catch like a cold.
The story moves across global hubs like Paris, Venice and New York, but the presentation is consistently, almost distractingly, expensive. Whether the infected are hiding in upscale hotels or private residences, the aesthetic remains polished to a fault. The corporate world is defined by Forst’s offices — spartan, sterile rooms that feel like operating theaters. In one sequence, we see Forst’s wife, Franny (Isabella Rossellini), hosting a dinner on a massive yacht; it’s a scene that captures the show’s central disconnect. I found myself wondering and wandering, watching these characters drift through these luxury backdrops, if the production was less about serving the story and more about justifying a global tour for the cast and crew to enjoy themselves on the studio’s dime. The presentation is high-fashion and gorgeous, even as the concept beneath it remains utterly gritty and half-baked.
The plot splits into two competing realities that bear the rather silly titles “Beautiful Pilot,” “Beautiful Jordan,” “Beautiful Christopher Cross,” “Beautiful Chimp Face,” “Beautiful Billionaires,” “Beautiful Patient Zero,” “Beautiful Living Rooms,” “Beautiful Cold Shoulder,” “Beautiful Combustion” and “Beautiful Aftermath.” It is a chore to follow. On one side, there is the “Viral Strain,” an accidental lab leak that turns a potential medical breakthrough into a plague spread through intimacy. On the other, there is the “Synthetic Serum,” a controlled version sold by Byron Forst.
The horror here is that the victims are literally paying to walk toward their own funeral; whether they catch the virus through sex or buy the injection, they are sold a lie of perfection with no inkling that they have an expiration date. Forst views the human body as a flawed piece of hardware, once telling his competitors: “Eat a melon ball, then maybe you can all give the Ozempic you’re mainlining a rest, you fat, treacherous lawn chairs.” He protects his market by sending his cleaner, Christopher Cross — the Assassin — to kill anyone carrying the volatile, free version of the virus. Anthony Ramos does a fantastic job here, playing a man physically trapped in his prime — looking 30, but actually 65. He brings a tragic, weary humanity to a character that could have easily been a one-dimensional enforcer. As he explains to a victim: “I haven’t felt the wind on my skin in 30 years. I’m just a beautiful, air-conditioned tomb.”
Ramos is joined by Jeremy, the Assassin’s troubled apprentice, played initially by Jaquel Spivey and then by Jeremy Pope. Jeremy, who starts as a bitter incel, undergoes a grotesque transformation into a hyper-sexualized man who uses his newfound “perfection” to overcompensate for his past. In a particularly bizarre scene, he performs a sexual encounter in front of the Assassin, only to be coldly critiqued on his prowess by the older man. Pope plays him with a frantic, desperate energy that’s hard to watch; you’re essentially seeing a man try to perform his own value, and it’s genuinely sad to see how much he degrades himself just to feel seen. It’s a difficult, abrasive watch that just makes the whole show feel even more hollow.
The investigation falls to FBI agents Cooper Madsen and Jordan Bennett. They’re partners in the field and romantically involved — a “situationship” that feels trivial at first but becomes painfully real as Jordan’s transformation turns her into something increasingly artificial. Their journey is where the personal stakes get messy, especially when their “optimizations” go wrong. Jordan’s story is the show’s most jarring turn; after a gruesome metamorphosis, she is “optimized” into a new person — physically flawless, but hollowed out. Cooper’s transformation is even more absurd, as he emerges not as a perfected adult, but as a young boy, leading Jordan to comment with biting detachment: “He doesn’t even have pubic hair yet.”
Once infected, these individuals don’t just gain “superpowers”; they are pushed into a toxic, permanent state of fight-or-flight. Their nervous systems fire at a lethal frequency, granting them incredible speed and reflexes while simultaneously stripping away their capacity for empathy or long-term thought. They become predatory animals, physically precise but mentally adrift in a sensory nightmare. As the “new” Jordan puts it: “I remember the smell of rain. I remember it because it’s in the file. But I don’t remember how it felt. Perfection isn’t having everything — it’s having nothing left to lose.”
The performances carry the weight of these bizarre developments. Evan Peters anchors as Cooper Madsen, bringing a tired, grounded intensity that makes him the only person who feels real in this madness. Opposite him, Kutcher plays Forst with a cold, detached menace, telling his board: “You call it ‘humanity.’ I call it the debris of an obsolete operating system. We aren’t deleting people; we’re just upgrading the hardware.” The role of Jordan Bennett, split between Rebecca Hall and Jessica Alexander, is the show’s hardest task, capturing the tragedy of a woman replaced by a corporate asset. Their work is solid, but they are often stuck in plots that care more about their own high-concept ideas than the people trapped inside them.
Ultimately, “The Beauty” is a slog. It requires a lot of mental heavy lifting to keep up with the rapid shifts in tone, and the lack of buzz is well earned. It’s an exhausting watch that asks you to piece together a story that often feels like it’s working against itself. While the show is visually striking, the pacing suffers because we spend 10 long episodes with characters who rarely feel like anything more than walking types. As Cooper says to the “optimized” Jordan: “You’re not a person anymore, Jordan. You’re a luxury product that screams when it bleeds. And the scariest part? You don’t even know the difference.”
Throughout the run, I kept waiting for the show to say something meaningful about our obsession with vanity, but it rarely gets past the surface. By the finale, when Forst notes that “the irony of the fire is that it’s the only time these people ever really shine. They spend their whole lives trying to look like stars, and they only succeed the moment they burn to ash,” I found myself sympathizing with the characters’ inevitable end. I pushed myself to reach the conclusion; it’s all so “out there,” and the experience left me feeling drained.
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