Ryan Murphy’s The Beauty Is Wildly Entertaining and Surprisingly Smart

The new series kicks off with two episodes on January 21st, and its core idea strongly resembles the dark comedy horror film The Substance, a 2024 Best Picture nominee that garnered Oscar nods for director Coralie Fargeat and star Demi Moore. The series centers around a groundbreaking biotech product called The Beauty, which triggers dramatic physical changes – through a somewhat disturbing process involving a fleshy cocoon – transforming people who are old, sick, or considered unattractive into young, healthy, and beautiful versions of themselves. Most showrunners would likely try to distance their work from a recent, popular film. However, creator Greg Murphy is known for being bold. Interestingly, he cast Ashton Kutcher – famous both as an actor and a venture capitalist, and for marrying Demi Moore when she was 42 and he was 27 – as the mastermind behind The Beauty.








