‘The Beauty’ review: Beauty standards and body horror

My favorite thing in “The Beauty,” a body-horror procedural adventure from Ryan Murphy and Matthew Hodgson premiering Wednesday on FX and Hulu, is a Chad and Jeremy joke buried in a line of dialogue that will mean nothing to anyone who doesn’t know the ‘60s singing duo responsible for “Distant Shores” and “A Summer Song,” or remember their appearance as the Redcoats on “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” I can almost feel the satisfaction, the inward chuckle that must have accompanied the writing of it. The rest of the series’ 11-episode first season I found somewhat less delightful — but then, delight is the last thing on its mind.

To begin. A supermodel (played by real-life supermodel Bella Hadid) goes berserk on a Paris runway, grabbing water bottles from spectators, draining the contents, throwing bodies around like … empty water bottles. Stealing a motorcycle, she rides recklessly through the streets of Paris as the Prodigy’s “Firestarter” thumps on the soundtrack until she’s knocked flying by a car. Pulling herself almost together, she enters a cafe, grabs and guzzles more water, causes even more grievous bodily harm, is shot, keeps going and, exiting to the street, is confronted by a phalanx of gendarmes with guns drawn. Then she explodes. Cue opening credits.

The show develops information slowly and out of chronological order, so if you’re averse to knowing even the basics of the premise, you may want to stop reading now — though I wouldn’t consider any of what follows a spoiler. At the center of the fun is a drug called the Beauty, which can transform the ugliest duckling into the loveliest swan but after a while develops the unfortunate side effect described above, making hotness literal. (This is why we have the FDA, people.) Even more unfortunate, in respect to global health, once a dose is administered — “One shot and you’re hot” is the series’ log line — it becomes a virus capable of being transmitted sexually, and, given how people are, you know how that’ll go.

This alarms the incomparably wealthy character behind the drug — whom press materials identify only as the Corporation (Ashton Kutcher, Hollywood hunk) in order to keep a secret — not because people might die, but because it threatens his plans to market the Beauty, which has crept out of his control and into the world. (It’s not a great business plan, anyway.) Indeed, his way of cleaning up problems is murder, to which end he employs a sinister figure called the Assassin (Anthony Ramos), though he will do the job himself if convenient. (Anthony will acquire an assistant assassin, Jeremy, played by Jeremy Pope.)

The case of the exploding supermodel brings into the picture a pair of Paris-based FBI agents, Cooper Madsen (Evan Peters) and Jordan Bennett (Rebecca Hall), and their dry Mulder and Scully banter and tailored-suits panache is my second-favorite thing about “The Beauty.” (Unlike Mulder and Scully, we don’t have to wait around for them to sleep together; we meet them in bed.) As beautiful people keep blowing up in beautiful places, they’ll chase the bug to Venice and Rome and New York, with famous sights highlighted to demonstrate that the production is not doubling locations in Prague or Vancouver. Like nearly everything else in this production and milieu, it smells of money (and vacations written into the budget, maybe), but it still might be my third-favorite thing about the series. That the agents speak French and Italian is a nice, elevating touch.

From “The Picture of Dorian Gray” to “The Substance,” and most every vampire movie ever made, the search for everlasting youth and beauty never ends well. In the world we still manage to call real, one only has to turn on the news to see the self-inflicted carnage this obsession has wrought. (Notably, Murphy first got hot back in 2003 with “Nip/Tuck,” a well-regarded, unpleasant show about cosmetic surgeons.) There is some satirical intent here, I’d wager, regarding the shallow aspirations of this age of Ozempic. That the Corporation has a couple of lunk-headed sons might be meant to call President Trump to mind, though the character stands in for vile billionaires everywhere.

Of course, beauty is subject to taste and culture and all sorts of indefinable things. As Franny Forst, unaccountably married to the Corporation, Isabella Rosselini provides in her person the argument for aging gracefully. (She’ll get a speech about it too.) At the same time, Murphy and Hodgson, adapting a comic by Jeremy Haun and Jason A. Hurley, do not hesitate to make a fat person a sad person. The remodeled … patients, I guess you’d call them, though certainly good-looking, are hot in a generic, almost dull way — the women trim, the men muscled — which feels more sad than exciting. A Nobel-winning scientist will be trotted out to offer an “explanation” of how the drug works and what it can do, but it’s really just magic beans.

There’s plenty of gore and goo — the transformation process is not pretty. Some storylines are meant to be poignant but are overwhelmed by the weirdness or feel exploitative, or the characters aren’t dimensional enough to move you. There are plot twists, of course, and rejiggerings, but it’s too obvious to be really terrifying; the game is given away early. (That doesn’t rule out some icky second-season invention; this one ends on a cliffhanger.)

At the same time, there’s enough nonsense, edging into ridiculousness, that the series might best be approached as a black action-comedy — at the end of the opening scene, the gendarmes are splattered with pieces of supermodel — or a very fancy B (maybe C) picture. “Star Wars” built an empire on the latter.