Partway through the second episode of The Beauty, Ryan Murphy’s latest pretext for putting a bunch of hot actors on the same billing, Evan Peters’ FBI agent character Cooper Madsen announces, “An assistant editor at Vogue combusted in the Condé Nast cafeteria today.”
As someone who eats lunch in that cafeteria four times a week, I reacted first with a guffaw, then like Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the screen in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The caf — my caf — had been mentioned! How oddly specific that the place where I had just eaten a patty melt hours ago was being referenced in my press screener. Neat! But I didn’t expect it to be brought up again. Surely this was just a bit of table-setting dialogue meant to establish that this show about sexually transmitted yassification was taking place in the real world.
But then the third episode of The Beauty begins inside the Condé Nast cafeteria — or, at least an exaggerated version of it. In a flashback, Ben Platt and Meghan Trainor play two well-dressed Vogue staffers who watch their aforementioned colleague explode after a short, intentionally satirical conversation about lip filler and plastic surgery. And this time, the joy of recognition was replaced with an annoying need to point out every way that Ryan Murphy and co-creator Matt Hodgson had gotten the details of the Condé Nast cafeteria wrong.
For one, this scene certainly wasn’t filmed in our HQ: the angled terrace windows look more like midtown than downtown. Second, while there are certainly many fashionable people eating undressed salads at any given moment, we don’t all come to work in monochromatic designer outfits. Earlier today, I ate plantains in pants with an elastic waistband — a far cry from the single carrot slice and three peas Platt’s character is shown moving around on his plate. Also, no one has ever spontaneously combusted in our cafeteria.
Ultimately, it makes sense that Murphy and crew would build a subplot of The Beauty around Condé Nast: For decades, the Vogue name has been synonymous with beauty. So, if you’re going to adapt a comic book about people catching an STI that makes you hot, the choice to satirize fashion media makes sense. At least, I certainly hope that’s the explanation, and not the fact that the esteemed LGBTQ+ magazine in the same building didn’t love Dahmer.
I like to picture myself as one of the many nameless Condé Nast editors shown quarantined at the end of the third episode, kept in a room with padded walls somewhere in the subbasement of a secret government facility. “What are we doing with them?” Madsen asks upon seeing the sorry lot, to which his colleague replies, “Awaiting instruction.” That doesn’t sound like I’ll be having plantains again anytime soon, which is worrying. But on the bright side, I bet Them could produce some of its best work locked in a windowless room together. If “Transgender Mice, Ranked” is indicative of what we can accomplish while having access to real-world distractions, imagine all the trans-coded animals we could sort and classify while Evan Peters waits for us to explode. Lizards, cats, kangaroos — we’d get so much done.
Look, this was supposed to be a review of The Beauty but it’s hard to assess a series objectively when it suddenly starts centering the place where you regularly assemble your rice bowls and listen to the pop hits of the early 2000s. But I suppose the latest addition to the Ryan Murphy industrial complex is a perfectly watchable procedural with many of the same themes as The Substance and some pretty cool body horror effects. Like The Substance, it hits its message a little harder than it has to, but it does it with such panache, it can get away with it. There are worse ways to spend your time than watching this show. You could, for instance, eat one of the pre-made sandwiches in the Condé Nast cafeteria, which are not my favorite. Go to the deli station instead.
