Ryan Murphy’s The Beauty doesn’t tiptoe in with a gentle “love yourself” message. Nope. It kicks down the door and drags you into a world where you can literally buy the face you want, the abs you manifest on Pinterest, and the confidence your therapist keeps begging you to unlock. And just when everyone is living their hottest, glossiest, most delusionally perfect lives… Murphy hits the countdown.
Because after 855 days? That enhanced, sculpted, snatched body detonates—thanks to a “perfect” virus. Not metaphorically. Not emotionally. Boom. This is the kind of premise you get when Ryan Murphy stops winking at horror and decides to make it his full-time job.
FX and Hulu are rolling out the series on January 21, 2026, and early descriptions make it sound less like Murphy’s usual glam-chaos and more like a pressure cooker with contour. The Beauty isn’t here to preach about vanity or shame you for wanting to look good. It’s here to show what happens when the whole world becomes obsessed with its “best self”—and what it costs when perfection has an expiration date.
It’s messy. It’s bold. It’s explosive. Very Murphy.
Evan Peters Plays a Character Who Sees Through Fashion Façades
Evan Peters, a Ryan Murphy favorite, has always had a talent for playing characters who notice things other people miss. Where other characters are hopeful or oblivious, he observes dysfunction with quiet, analytical dread. In The Beauty, he plays an investigator tracking unexplained deaths across supermodel cities, like New York, Paris, Venice, and anywhere glamour tends to gather.
The corpses don’t make sense, the timelines don’t match, and each time Peters’ character gets close to a lead, someone else disappears. He looks worn down, but stubborn, determined, and laser focused. He’s the one person who understands that these deaths aren’t freak accidents; they’re scheduled.
It’s a role that fits him. Peters isn’t being eerie for the sake of the genre. He’s playing a character who refuses to look away while the rest of the world is too busy obsessing over its own reflection.
Ashton Kutcher is the Billionaire Behind The Beauty Serum
And then there’s Ashton Kutcher, an unexpected sharp choice for the man at the top of the beauty empire. Kutcher plays the tech billionaire whose company engineered the serum, marketed it as a harmless aesthetic miracle, and quietly ignored the expiration date that made it a virus.
The version of Kutcher we get in The Beauty isn’t goofy or laid-back. He feels cold, controlled, and almost bored by the consequences of his own deadly invention. He’s not a villain twirling a metaphorical mustache. He’s something worse: a man who genuinely believes he’s helping the world, while knowingly creating an epidemic of people who look perfect on the outside while they rot on the inside.
His character is the type who sees a body explode and still wonders how to spin it for the next quarterly report. And that’s why he works in this role.
Ryan Murphy is Aiming for Decay, Not Campy Horror
Ryan Murphy loves attention-grabbing horror, but The Beauty is built differently. There’s no wink to the audience, no neon-drenched self-awareness. The glamour exists on runway shows, red carpets, and elaborate fashion worlds, but the sparkle is paired with something ugly underneath. Instead of leaning into campy horror, Murphy is playing it straight, letting the absurdity of the fashion world speak for itself.
It’s beauty as infection and social currency. Beauty as the thing that everyone wants, even when they know it will kill them. Reports from Gold Derby suggest that Murphy is treating The Beauty as less like a horrifying soap opera and more like a thriller.
The Beauty feels uncomfortably close to real life. That’s what makes the show so unsettling. It’s not some distant dystopia because it looks like right now, especially when everyone is clamoring for injections, filters, smoothness, nips, tucks, enhancements, and optimizations. Ryan Murphy’s new series just imagines a version of obsession where the price of perfection is an internal countdown you can’t stop.