[COLUMN] Ryan Murphy's The Beauty is Beautiful Trash | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the first three episodes of The Beauty, which launched this week on FX and the associated streaming services. The paradox of The Beauty is that, like a lot of Ryan Murphy’s shows, it is that cocktail of not very good and compulsively watchable. It’s very daft, occasionally weirdly earnest, and never ashamed of itself. I wouldn’t recommend it, but I have also watched a lot worse. So consider yourself warned.

The Beauty, the latest television show from writer and producer Ryan Murphy, is not very good. However, it is strangely compelling, particularly as a window into Murphy’s window into the nasty exploitative id of contemporary pop culture.

Murphy is one of the great modern television auteurs, where “great” is used to convey a sense of importance more than as a qualitative judgment. It is worth acknowledging up front that Murphy has made some honestly brilliant television, particularly the first two seasons of the anthology series American Crime Story, looking at the OJ Simpson (Cuba Gooding Jr.) trial and the murder of Gianni Versace (Édgar Ramírez). He also produced Pose, exploring the New York LGBTQ+ scene.

Murphy is a prolific producer, but there have certainly been some misfires along the way. His film productions for Netflix, including a charming version of The Boys in the Band and an abominable adaptation of The Prom, seem likely to slip between the cracks of history, alongside his epic political life-spanning comedy The Politician which is (supposedly) still getting a third and final season at some point. However, in a career as expansive as Murphy’s, some misfires are inevitable.

Murphy’s instincts skew populist. He created Glee, the literal high school musical show that became a true phenomenon. He created the sensationalist grotesque anthology series American Horror Story, which has run twelve seasons. More recently, he created the Angela-Bassett-starring procedural 9-1-1, which was successful enough to spawn a Rob-Lowe-starring Texas-based spin-off 9-1-1: Lone Star and a Chris-O’Donnell-starring Tennessee-based spin-off 9-1-1: Nashville.

There is something shameless about Murphy’s oeuvre, which is committed to pushing television as far as it can go to get a reaction from the audience. 9-1-1 is distinguished from other procedural franchises like Law & Order or NCIS by a willingness to embrace absurdity. Would Law & Order: Organized Crime open its season with a “bee-nado?” Are the NCIS team going to explore a shark attack on a freeway? Will a CSI episode have a man’s chest crack open during CPR like The Thing?

Murphy really established himself as a television producer to watch with Nip/Tuck, an early FX show about the world of plastic surgery in Miami, with sensationalist subplots including incest and amputee sex. This sensibility carries through to Murphy’s more recent work, with his cruise ship medical show Doctor Odyssey featuring a broken penis less than fifteen minutes into its first episode. Murphy recognizes a yearning for the lurid in mainstream American consciousness.

He has certainly been vindicated. While Netflix struggled to justify the expense of David Fincher’s more restrained psychological profiling series Mindhunter, Murphy’s more openly exploitative Monster was a smash hit for the streaming service, becoming its second-biggest English language show. His recent Kim Kardashian legal drama All’s Fair might have been justifiably trashed in reviews, but it was also Hulu’s biggest scripted debut in almost three years.

Murphy is, to put it simply, a trash monster. He is unpretentious and unembarrassed in his sensibility. He refuses to be ashamed as he produces absurd and gratuitous nonsense that feels like scripted freak shows for the social media age. Much has been written about the rise of “nerd culture”, but Murphy seems to believe the audience is still drawn to “the geek show.” To paraphrase critic Henry L. Mencken, Murphy will seemingly never go broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

It is hard to write about Murphy’s work without seeming judgmental. Simply describing the content and tone of his work can seem passive-aggressive, as if sneering at the inherent absurdity of it all and the implied contempt for the audience. Is there a negative connotation in acknowledging Murphy’s assumption that audiences hunger for incest soap operas and sexy serial killers? Is there an accusation in the acknowledgement that, based on ratings, he’s right?

Even as an experiment, it is an interesting sensation to give one’s self over to a Ryan Murphy show, to embrace it and let it wash the viewer. It’s fascinating to try to meet the work on its own terms and at its own level. Murphy’s latest effort, The Beauty, is a fascinating and misbegotten object. The basic plot of the show concerns the spread of a sexually transmitted disease that makes people beautiful – in the parlance of the show, “the fucked up lovechild of HIV and Rabies.” Think of it as a shallow take on Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance. “The Style”, perhaps?

The critical instinct is to fight, to push back at the inherent absurdity of the premise. The Beauty follows two FBI Agents assigned to investigate a series of absurd and grotesque body horror incidents in the world of high fashion, played by Evan Peters and Rebecca Hall. The pair are introduced having movie-star sex in a Paris hotel room. And immediately the show bumps against its first logical issue, asking the audience to believe that Peters and Hall are not two perfect specimens of humanity.

Sure, Peters has some stubble and some bags under his eyes. Hall is given some dialogue about the size of her breasts. However, it’s not as if these two actors are even in the “moderately attractive” bracket by Hollywood standards. The series puts the pair in the same room as beloved character actor John Carroll Lynch and asks the audience to assume that all three are equidistant from society’s beauty norms. The premise immediately does not work.

However, there is a cynical and crass logic underpinning this creative decision to undermine the logic of the show. The assumption is that the audience doesn’t want to spend half of the show’s runtime with a pair of less photogenic actors than Peters and Hall, and doesn’t want to watch them having clumsy and awkward realistic sex. Such commitment to the premise might appeal to snooty critics, but not to the average viewer.

The Beauty makes an unspoken compact with the viewer that the viewer will accept that Peters and Hall are just average-looking people and in return the show will let them watch Peters and Hall solving sexy crimes together in beautiful international locations and pretend that this is something resembling a tough life for either character. This isn’t some artisanal example of prestige television. It’s something to stick on with a glass of wine in one hand and a phone in the other.

The scripting is similarly careless. In the first episode, Doctor Dilegre (Jon Jon Briones) has to explain terms like “chad” and “incel” to basement-dwelling loner Jeremy (Jaquel Spivey). Dilegre explains that an “incel” is an “an involuntary celibate; you try and you try and you can’t copulate with females. And that fact is driving you literally insane, isn’t it, Jeremy?” This seems like news to Jeremy, but two episodes later Jeremy is casually dropping internet lingo like “queen of spades” or “BBC.”

Once again, the critic’s brain would react against such sloppy screenwriting, this seemingly variable level of awareness that Jeremy has of the most basic online lingo. It is absurd to think that a dude lurking on “the dark web” hasn’t heard the term “incel”, but it is somehow more absurd to think that he hasn’t heard “incel” but also casually uses “queen of spades.” However, that crass and cynical logic is at play again. Dilegre isn’t explaining to Jeremy, he’s explaining to the offline audience.

There is a lot of this sort of nonsense in the first couple of episodes of The Beauty. For example, the show has a recurring joke concerning characters complaining about the quality of the hotels in which they are staying, but it can’t seem to track which characters have that specific bit. Early on, Agent Madsen (Peters) and Agent Bennett (Hall) complain, but the joke circles around with global assassin Antonia (Anthony Ramos) paying it off – having yet to interact with Madsen or Bennett.

Without getting into spoilers, having seen the entire first season, there is a sense that The Beauty was written by a creative team that could only ever remember the last five pages they wrote and couldn’t be bothered scrolling further back in their archives. The show takes on a sort of bizarre madlibs quality as it goes. This lack of cohesion is even more absurd because every episode of The Beauty was co-written by Ryan Murphy and Matthew Hodgson.

It would be unfair (and violate the embargo) to cite specific examples, but there’s big “… they commissioned eleven episodes of this?” energy to the scripting as the show progresses, where it seems like no idea tossed out in the writers’ room could afford to be deemed a bad idea and nobody felt it worth the effort to go back to smooth over what had already been written to make it fit with whatever grabbed the duo’s interest in the moment. It is only a slight exaggeration to suggest that the show could introduce wizards in its home stretch and it would remain just as grounded.

However, there is a sense in which this is the wrong way to engage with The Beauty. The show isn’t operating according to any internal logic of plot or character. Instead, there is a visceral reptile-brain energy to The Beauty that seeks nothing more than immediate gratification. It doesn’t matter that Peters and Hall don’t scan as “unbeautiful” people, it only matters that there’s an immediate serotonin release in watching hot people have movie-star sex in a foreign hotel room and that reaction will keep the audience watching.

This approach is obvious in the show’s introductory sequence, which finds model Ruby Rossdale (Bella Hadid) going on an intense crime spree through the streets of Paris – call it “catwalk carnage.” She finds herself compelled to drink obscene amounts of water – because, you see, in this social media age everybody is “thirsty.” At the end of the sequence, her body temperature rises so dramatically that she explodes – she has literally become so “hot” that it kills her.

Acknowledging itself as a riff on The Substance, it casts Demi Moore’s ex-husband Ashton Kutcher. While Kutcher is hardly one of the greatest actors of his generation, his performance in The Beauty as evil billionaire Byron Frost is definitely a choice, and it is a choice that makes a great deal of sense given subsequent reveals. Is it a good performance? Who is to say? It is, however, undeniably fun in a very basic sort of way. It’s camp, it’s committed, it’s unapologetic. It’s high-calorie low-fiber television, designed to be watched in five-second chunks, that doesn’t even ask you to think of it as a guilty pleasure.

This is really the level at which The Beauty operates. It is a clever sort of dumb, a very cannily constructed appeal to the most base impulses. There is something really interesting about The Beauty and a lot of Murphy’s productions. It is beautifully produced, shooting in real locations with an atmospheric synth soundtrack. It has a legitimately wonderful cast. It certainly has its heart (mostly) in the right place as a critique of late capitalism and social media and beauty standards.

It is also a deeply depressing attempt to meet audiences where Murphy has determined they are. It has the production value of other recent FX offerings like Fargo, Shōgun or Alien: Earth, but is written and made for viewers to treat as “second screen content.” Murphy is a literate and thoughtful producer, but he’s also a key recurring collaborator with Kim Kardashian, and shows like All is Fair or The Beauty feel like an effort to bring her sordid reality television sensibility to scripted drama.

There is something very ugly at the heart of The Beauty. It is not simply the sense that Murphy believes this is what audiences want, but also that he might be right. It is hard to look away.