The Beauty FX Review: Ryan Murphy's Latest Misstep [2025]

The Beauty FX Review: When a Creator's Reputation Becomes a Liability

Ryan Murphy has built an empire on the back of prestige television. American Horror Story redefined the anthology format. Glee, despite its chaotic final seasons, launched a thousand think pieces about representation in mainstream media. Ratched brought gothic horror aesthetics to the origin story. The Politician weaponized camp as a storytelling device. Yet somehow, with The Beauty arriving on Hulu, Murphy has created something that manages to be worse than all of his previous failures combined—not because it's deliberately bad like some of his camp work, but because it appears to have no idea what it wants to be.

The premise promises intrigue: a mysterious spa opens in a small town, and women start disappearing or transforming in deeply unsettling ways. It's the kind of setup that should work. Horror-thriller beats combined with body horror elements could create something genuinely unsettling. Instead, what unfolds across the limited series is a narrative disaster that doesn't understand its own logic, wastes an ensemble cast of talented actors, and mistakes visual chaos for thematic complexity.

What makes The Beauty particularly frustrating is that it's not entertainingly bad. It's not the kind of mess you can enjoy ironically, the way you might appreciate Glee's most unhinged moments or American Horror Story's campiest detours. It's a show that seems to have been made by people who forgot halfway through what story they were telling, who lost track of character motivation, and who believed that throwing increasingly absurd plot twists at viewers would substitute for actual narrative coherence.

This review isn't here to mock a creator for taking risks. Murphy's willingness to experiment, to fail publicly, to push boundaries—those are admirable qualities. But The Beauty isn't ambitious in its failure. It's just confused. It's a show that wastes your time without the courtesy of being weird enough to justify the waste.

TL; DR

• The Core Problem: The Beauty fails to establish coherent logic for its mysterious spa, leaving viewers confused about basic plot mechanics and character motivations
• Cast Underutilization: An ensemble of talented actors (including notable performers) are given inconsistent character arcs that contradict themselves across episodes
• Narrative Incoherence: The show doesn't understand its own mythology, leading to plot holes that can't be explained by intentional mystery or ambiguity
• Style Over Substance: Visual spectacle masks a complete absence of thematic clarity or emotional stakes
• The Verdict: The Beauty represents Murphy at his least interesting, neither bold enough to be controversial nor coherent enough to be compelling

Estimated data suggests 'All's Fair' had more ambition and creativity, despite its chaos, compared to 'The Beauty', which lacked coherence and execution.

The Setup That Promises Everything and Explains Nothing

The Beauty introduces us to a mysterious wellness spa run by an enigmatic proprietor whose motivations remain unclear throughout the series. Women in the town begin to experience strange transformations. Some vanish entirely. Others return changed in ways that the show struggles to articulate. The mystery should drive the narrative forward. Instead, it becomes an excuse for the show to introduce random plot elements whenever momentum flags.

The fundamental problem is that The Beauty never establishes internal logic. Magic systems, even unexplained ones, need rules. Mysteries need coherence. A viewer should be able to watch episode three and retroactively understand how it connects to events in episode one, even if the larger mystery remains unsolved. Here, that doesn't happen. Characters act inconsistently. The spa's actual operations make no sense. The transformation process gets explained and re-explained with contradictory information that the show doesn't acknowledge.

Consider a simple question: what does the spa actually do? The show suggests different answers at different times. It's a place of genuine healing that goes wrong. It's a trap set by someone with sinister intentions. It's a portal to something supernatural. It's a psychological phenomenon. These could all coexist in a more sophisticated narrative, but The Beauty treats them as interchangeable rather than as layers of mystery that inform each other.

This kind of narrative confusion isn't ambiguity. Ambiguity is deliberate. It's the Lynchian uncertainty of Twin Peaks, where you accept that some questions won't be answered because the mystery serves a thematic purpose. The Beauty just doesn't seem to know what it's doing. It's the difference between a filmmaker saying "I'm leaving this intentionally mysterious" and a filmmaker saying "I didn't think through the implications of this plot point, so I'm moving on."

The setting itself—a small town where everyone apparently knows each other but also where mysterious arrivals go unquestioned—exists in a kind of narrative void. The town isn't developed enough to feel lived-in, but it's not stylized enough to feel intentionally artificial. It's just... there. And the spa, despite being the central location, gets precious little screen time where we actually see how it operates, what the staff is doing, or why anyone would keep returning to a place where people keep disappearing.

The chart highlights key reasons for 'The Beauty' series failure, with the integration of genre elements being the most impactful issue. Estimated data based on narrative analysis.

The Cast Deserves Better: Talent Abandoned by Script

Ryan Murphy has always had a knack for assembling impressive ensembles. He creates opportunities for actors to shine, to play against type, to find unexpected dimensions in complex characters. The Beauty has the skeleton of another Murphy ensemble: talented performers who should be able to carry a narrative on the strength of their work. Instead, they're given characters that don't maintain consistency from scene to scene.

The main protagonist experiences character arcs that seem to reset between episodes. She'll make a decision based on established motivation, and then in the next episode, she's making contradictory choices that require you to assume her entire worldview changed offscreen. This wouldn't be a problem if the show acknowledged the internal conflict or showed us her growth. Instead, it just moves forward as if nothing happened, expecting viewers to accept that people change their fundamental nature without reason.

Supporting characters fare worse. A friend who starts the series as a voice of reason becomes inexplicably antagonistic later, not because she's been corrupted or manipulated (which could be interesting), but because the plot needs her to be an obstacle. When she returns to being helpful, there's no acknowledgment that she was ever working against the protagonist. It's as though multiple versions of the script got shuffled together and no one bothered to edit out the contradictions.

One of the most egregious examples involves a character's knowledge of what's happening at the spa. Early on, she seems to understand something about the transformations. Later, she acts shocked by the same information. The show never explains how her knowledge changes. Did she forget? Did she learn something new that contradicts what she knew before? The script doesn't care. It just needs her to react a certain way in each scene, consistency be damned.

This kind of character work is particularly frustrating because the cast clearly has the skill to do more. You can see moments where the actors are trying to dig deeper, to find layers that justify the contradictions. But they're working without a safety net. There's no coherent character through-line for them to follow. They're just reacting to whatever the plot demands in each individual scene.

When a show wastes this much talent this badly, it's not just a narrative failure. It's a creative one. These actors could be exploring fascinating character dynamics if given material that understood what it was doing. Instead, they're essentially improvising around a script that keeps changing the rules.

The Transformation Mythology: A Case Study in Unexplained Everything

At the center of The Beauty's plot is a transformation process that supposedly makes women beautiful, powerful, or enhanced in some way. The show hints at this being desirable, dangerous, supernatural, scientific, psychological, and metaphorical—sometimes all at once. This could work if The Beauty were building layers of understanding. Instead, it's just piling on contradictions.

Early episodes suggest the transformations are permanent and irreversible. Middle episodes imply they can be resisted or undone through willpower. Later episodes treat them as something that spread like a contagion. The show never clarifies whether these are three different phenomena or whether it's describing the same process through different metaphors. Without that clarity, the stakes become meaningless. If transformation can be reversed, where's the danger? If it's permanent, why does it spread inconsistently? If it's psychological, why do people experience physical changes?

The mechanism of transformation also shifts frustratingly. Is it something in the spa's water? Something in the air? A deliberate procedure performed by staff? Something the protagonist triggers through her own desires? Meditation? A malevolent supernatural force? The show touches on all of these and commits to none. A mystery can survive without immediate answers, but it can't survive without internal consistency about how answers will eventually arrive.

Consider how this compares to genuinely effective mystery television. The Lost approach, despite its eventual failures, at least committed to the idea that mysteries had answers that would eventually emerge, even if fans debated what those answers should be. The Twin Peaks method maintains coherent rules about what the supernatural forces can and can't do, even when their origins remain unclear. The Beauty doesn't maintain even basic consistency about its own mechanics.

The body horror elements that should make this genuinely unsettling get undercut by this same lack of clarity. Body horror works best when there's a clear violation of bodily autonomy or logic. When we understand what's being done to bodies and why, we can recoil. Here, because the transformations are so inconsistently portrayed, it's hard to even understand what's supposed to be horrifying about them. Are women being harmed? Are they achieving something they want? The show doesn't seem to know, so neither do viewers.

What's particularly frustrating is that the show occasionally hints at genuinely interesting thematic territory. There are moments where the transformations seem to be about female desire, about rejecting societal standards of beauty, about power dynamics. But these themes are introduced and then dropped whenever the plot needs to go somewhere else. It's like the writers identified potentially rich material and then actively chose not to explore it.

Estimated data suggests that Ryan Murphy's early work had higher narrative coherence, while recent projects like 'The Beauty' focus more on visual style, potentially at the expense of storytelling.

The Pacing Problem: A Show Unsure of Its Own Rhythm

The Beauty is a limited series, which means every episode should move the narrative forward. Instead, many episodes feel like filler masquerading as plot development. A typical episode might begin with a cliffhanger, spend forty minutes going in circles, and then introduce a new revelation in the final minutes that resets expectations. This doesn't create momentum. It creates frustration.

The show frequently indulges in slow-burn sequences that seem designed to build tension but mostly just kill time. A character might spend an entire episode deciding whether to do something, only to not do it, only for that decision to have no consequences in the next episode. Scenes get repeated with minimal variation. Conversations circle back to the same plot points as if nobody's been paying attention. For a limited series where every minute should count, this is a critical failure.

Effective pacing requires understanding the difference between slowness and slowburn. A slow episode can work if it's using that slowness to build character or thematic complexity. The Beauty moves slowly without building anything. It's just slow. Characters sit around discussing the same concerns episode after episode. Investigations go nowhere. Revelations don't actually reveal anything new about what's happening or why.

The finale attempts to rush through explanations that should have been seeded throughout the series. Suddenly there are reveals about motivations and backstory that the show had no foundation for. Because viewers have spent six hours confused about basic mechanics, these final revelations don't land with impact. They just feel like information dumps trying to create closure for a narrative that never had shape to begin with.

A tightly paced limited series should feel like a movie broken into chapters. The Beauty feels like a feature film's plot stretched across six episodes with filler added to reach a runtime. The solution wasn't more episodes. It was a better understanding of what story needed to be told and how much time that story actually requires.

The Visual Language Problem: Pretty But Empty

One thing The Beauty does commit to is visual style. The cinematography is often beautiful. The spa is designed to look striking. Murphy's knack for visual storytelling is present in individual shots and sequences. But visual spectacle divorced from narrative purpose becomes just decoration. The Beauty mistakes looking good for meaning something.

The show uses color, lighting, and composition to create atmosphere, but it doesn't use those visual choices to communicate story information. In the best television, visual language works in concert with narrative language to deepen meaning. A character's color palette might shift as they transform. The spa's architecture might reveal things about its purpose. Blocking might show power dynamics. The Beauty looks great but doesn't say anything with its visuals beyond "look how aesthetically accomplished this is."

This is particularly noticeable in the transformation sequences. They're visually elaborate, sometimes genuinely striking. But because we don't understand what transformations mean or what's actually happening to the women experiencing them, the visual spectacle rings hollow. You're watching something pretty that doesn't connect to anything you care about.

Murphy's best work—American Horror Story's first season, especially—used visual language to build dread and meaning. Ghosts appeared in the background before characters acknowledged them. The house's design reflected its history. The imagery haunted you because it was connected to story and character. The Beauty uses imagery as set decoration. It's the difference between a production designer creating an environment that serves the story and an art department creating Instagram-ready shots.

The spa itself is the most visually accomplished character in the show, which is a problem because it's not a character at all. It's a location that should reflect the story happening within it. Instead, it's just a beautiful space where confusing things happen to occur.

While 'The Beauty' excels in production elements, it significantly lacks narrative coherence, highlighting a major imbalance in its execution. (Estimated data)

The Comparison That Haunts It: All's Fair in Love

The original review suggesting that The Beauty makes Murphy's previous failures look intentional references "All's Fair," which is widely considered one of his most creatively bankrupt projects. The implication is that at least All's Fair knew it was a mess. It had the excuse of creative recklessness. It owned its chaos.

The Beauty, by contrast, seems to believe it's telling a coherent story. It's confident in its confusion. That's somehow worse. A deliberately chaotic show can be fun. A show that's accidentally incoherent while believing itself to be mysterious becomes actively frustrating. You're watching someone fail and not realize they're failing.

This comparison is worth examining because it highlights what separates a failed ambitious project from a project that's simply poorly executed. When Murphy goes wrong—and he does go wrong frequently—it's usually in pursuit of something interesting. He's trying to push boundaries, to combine genres, to do something new. Sometimes it doesn't work. But you can see what he was attempting.

With The Beauty, that sense of intention is absent. There's no clear ambition visible, just decisions that don't connect to each other. It's not even bad in an interesting way. It's bad in the most frustrating way: incompetently.

The Ensemble Disaster: Too Many Unfinished Stories

Murphy's ensemble approach has always been hit or miss. When it works, you get multiple compelling character journeys that intersect and enrich each other. When it doesn't work, you get what The Beauty offers: a bunch of characters whose stories don't intersect meaningfully, don't develop coherently, and don't matter to the central plot.

The problem is structural. With so many characters, limited screen time means none of them get proper development. A character will be introduced with apparent significance, feature heavily in an episode, and then virtually disappear for two episodes, only to resurface with a completely different set of concerns. There's no sense of consistent existence. Characters are present when the plot needs them and absent otherwise.

Compare this to how a show like Glee handled ensemble casting, despite its eventual failures. Early Glee gave every character a moment to shine each episode. They had distinct voices and perspectives. Later Glee devolved into chaos partly because the ensemble got too large, but The Beauty never had that focus to begin with. It's chaotic from moment one because it can't juggle its characters.

One ensemble member seems positioned to be a major character before vanishing almost entirely. Another starts as supporting and randomly becomes crucial late in the series. The narrative doesn't seem to have a hierarchy of importance. Everyone's equally present and equally underdeveloped. This means there's no character whose journey viewers are truly invested in. When something happens to anyone, we don't have enough relationship to them to care meaningfully.

One of the core failures here is that The Beauty doesn't understand what makes Murphy's ensembles work at their best. When Ratched succeeds, it's because every member of that ensemble reinforces the story's themes from different angles. When American Horror Story works, it's because characters' motivations are aligned with the house's nature. The Beauty has characters floating around a spa with no clear relationship between their individual journeys and what the spa represents.

Estimated data shows low consistency ratings for character development in 'The Beauty', highlighting the script's failure to maintain coherent character arcs.

The Tone Problem: What Is This Show Trying to Be?

Tone is perhaps the most revealing indicator of a show that's lost its way. The Beauty seems to be simultaneously a psychological thriller, a supernatural horror story, a body horror piece, a dark comedy, and a meditation on beauty and power. It's not layering these genres. It's throwing them all at the wall and hoping something sticks.

A sequence might start as tense thriller and shift into dark comedy midway through with no transition. A scene that seems to have devastating implications is treated casually moments later. A character's trauma is played seriously in one episode and joked about in another. This isn't tonal variety. This is inconsistency masquerading as genre-blending.

Murphy at his best understands how to blend tones. American Horror Story Asylum might be horrifying and funny in the same scene because those tones are in service of a thematic point about institutional power. Here, the tonal shifts feel random, like different people wrote different scenes and nobody edited them into coherence.

When you can't identify what kind of show you're watching, it's hard to invest in it. You don't know whether to be horrified or amused. You don't know what outcome to hope for because you don't understand whether the stakes are tragic or comedic. This leaves viewers constantly off-balance in a way that doesn't serve the narrative.

A show can be experimental with tone. Twin Peaks is fundamentally strange and wildly tonal. But it commits to that strangeness as an aesthetic choice. The Beauty seems unsure whether it wants to be strange or conventional, committed to that uncertainty one way or the other.

The Mythology That Doesn't Mythologize: Symbolism Without Meaning

Throughout The Beauty, there are repeated images and concepts that seem like they should be meaningful. Water appears frequently. Beauty itself is discussed as both transcendent and corrupting. There are suggestions of ritual and transformation as metaphor for female sexuality, autonomy, or power. These elements have the scaffolding of mythology, but The Beauty never builds the actual structure.

Myth, even in contemporary television, requires consistency. The symbolism needs to mean the same thing across the narrative, or the show needs to clearly show why it means something different. Here, symbols shift meaning randomly. An image might represent one thing in episode two and something entirely different in episode five with no explanation for the shift.

The concept of beauty itself gets lip service as the show's central theme, but it never actually does anything thematic with it. Is the spa corrupting the women's understanding of beauty? Is it liberating them? Is it destroying them? The Beauty refuses to commit to a position. It wants to explore this thematic territory without actually exploring anything. It's theme as decoration rather than as structure.

When a show uses mythological or symbolic language, it creates an implicit promise to viewers that these symbols will eventually pay off, that they're part of a larger design. The Beauty makes that promise constantly and never fulfills it. Those elements remain just visual references that look meaningful but aren't.

Consider how many contemporary shows have successfully used beauty, transformation, and power as central symbols: American Gods, Penny Dreadful, even something like Westworld at its best. These shows understand that the symbol needs to actually symbolize something. The Beauty uses these concepts as window dressing. It looks like it's saying something profound about power dynamics and feminine agency, but beneath the surface, there's no actual argument being made.

The chart illustrates the estimated frequency of different transformation mechanisms mentioned in 'The Beauty'. The protagonist's desires and deliberate procedures are the most frequently suggested mechanisms.

The Dialogue Problem: Talking Without Communicating

Characters spend a lot of time talking in The Beauty. They explain things, discuss theories, debate next steps. The dialogue is often well-written at the sentence level. Individual lines are snappy. Conversations have the rhythm of natural speech. But dialogue divorced from character development is just noise, and The Beauty generates a lot of noise.

When two characters discuss the spa, they're not having a conversation that reveals their relationship, their values, or their character. They're just exchanging exposition. When someone argues about what to do next, it doesn't reflect their personality or needs. It just moves the plot along. The dialogue serves the story's machinery rather than the characters themselves.

Effective dialogue in mystery shows serves double duty: it advances the plot while revealing character. In The Beauty, these things are completely divorced. A character might advocate for a position, but their advocacy doesn't reflect their psychology. If they were replaced with a different character, the scene would function identically. There's no sense that these are individual people with specific perspectives.

One particularly egregious element is the repeated exposition dumps where characters catch each other up on information viewers already know. Redundant plot explanation isn't just boring. It suggests the writers don't trust the audience to follow what's happening. If the main plot were clear and compelling, these recap conversations could be minimized. The fact that they're frequent and lengthy suggests everyone involved knew the narrative was confusing and tried to compensate through exposition.

Dialogue works best when it does multiple things at once: advance plot, reveal character, build theme, create mood. The Beauty's dialogue accomplishes maybe one of those things at a time. Usually it's just advancing plot, and barely that, since the plot itself is so confused.

The Mystery That Isn't: Why You Don't Actually Care What Happens

A successful mystery makes you want to solve it. The better mysteries don't just make you curious about the answer. They make you emotionally invested in characters whose lives depend on that answer. The Beauty creates neither. You're not curious about what's happening at the spa because it's not coherent enough to be curious about. And you're not invested in the characters figuring it out because the characters themselves seem barely invested.

The mystery of The Beauty never builds momentum. Early on, something strange is happening. Okay. By midway through, we've learned almost nothing despite plenty of investigation. The investigation itself isn't dramatic or tense. It's just characters looking around and talking about how weird things are. Late in the series, revelations arrive without having been properly set up. The mystery doesn't solve itself through careful detective work or character intuition. It just... happens.

A mystery works when each piece of information makes you want to know more. When you find an answer, it should raise new questions that are even more compelling. The Beauty breaks this cycle. Each "revelation" feels random rather than earned. New mysteries aren't introduced. The original mystery just splits into multiple equally incoherent sub-mysteries.

The show also commits a cardinal sin of mystery storytelling: it hides information from the audience in a way that feels unfair. There are things characters know that viewers don't, which is fine. But there's no sense that viewers have enough information to theorize. A good mystery provides breadcrumbs. A bad mystery just leaves you in the dark and calls it mystery. The Beauty is the latter.

Worse, the resolution doesn't feel earned because we've never been given enough information to have theorized about it. In a mystery, the answer should make viewers feel either "oh, I didn't see that coming but it makes sense" or "I figured that out episodes ago." The Beauty creates a third category: "I have no idea why that's the answer because nothing in the show set it up."

The Ending That Explains Nothing: A Narrative Collapse

The finale of The Beauty attempts to wrap up its mysteries and provide closure. Instead, it succeeds primarily in crystallizing why the preceding episodes were so frustrating. Key information arrives in the final episode that should have been seeded throughout. Character motivations are revealed that don't align with prior actions. Questions are answered in ways that contradict what came before.

A ending doesn't have to tie everything up with a bow, but it should feel like a natural culmination of what came before. The Beauty's ending feels like it's from a different show. Events that should have been shocking because they're surprising land flat because they haven't been set up. Emotional moments don't hit because we haven't invested in these characters' arcs.

The most frustrating element of the finale is that it reveals the show actually had a coherent story somewhere in its DNA. Someone understood what was happening and why. That person just never managed to communicate it to the audience effectively. The ending suggests there was a version of this show that could have worked. This just wasn't that version.

A good final episode should make you want to immediately rewatch the series with new understanding. The Beauty's finale makes you grateful it's over. You have no desire to revisit it because there's nothing new to discover on rewatch. All the mystery was just incompetence, and knowing that doesn't improve the experience.

Characters behave in ways that feel contradictory even in the finale's explanations. Motivations feel forced. Outcomes seem unearned. It's not a satisfying conclusion. It's just a stopping point. The show ends, but it doesn't actually resolve. It just... stops.

What This Says About Murphy's Current Standing

The release of The Beauty raises uncomfortable questions about Ryan Murphy's creative direction. He's operating at a level of prestige and resources that most creators never achieve. He has first-look deals with major studios. His name alone gets shows greenlit and marketed. Yet increasingly, his projects seem to mistake style for substance, spectacle for storytelling.

There's an argument that Murphy's early work succeeded precisely because he had constraints. Limited budgets meant he had to focus on character and story because he couldn't rely on production value. A smaller canvas forced clear narrative choices. As his resources have expanded, his output has gotten messier. More money, more ambition, less focus.

Murphy's best work came when he had a clear voice and a specific vision. He's more successful when he commits to a particular tone or theme rather than trying to do everything simultaneously. The Politician worked because it understood what it was: a heightened dark comedy about political ambition. Even when it failed, it failed as itself.

The Beauty fails because it doesn't know what it is. It's trying to be a psychological thriller, a supernatural horror story, a body horror piece, a dark comedy, and a philosophical meditation on beauty and power. Instead of creating layers, this just creates confusion. The show would benefit from choosing two of those elements and committing to them fully.

There's also a question about whether Murphy is still interested in the mechanics of storytelling or whether he's more interested in having teams of writers and designers create visually accomplished content regardless of narrative coherence. When a show looks this good and tells such a confused story, it suggests those elements weren't working together. They were developed by different departments with no one ensuring they integrated.

The Larger Context: Where Are We in Prestige TV?

The Beauty arrives during a moment when the prestige television landscape is shifting. Streaming services are cutting budgets. The era of unlimited resources funding elaborate experiments seems to be ending. Shows are increasingly judged on viewership numbers rather than critical acclaim. In this context, a show that's visually stunning but narratively incoherent is a particular kind of failure. It spent resources on spectacle while failing at the basics of storytelling.

We're also in a moment where mystery and horror television has proven it can work at the highest levels when done well. Shows like True Detective season one, Chernobyl, and more recently The Outsider have shown that limited series can deliver complete, coherent narratives that satisfy viewers. The standards are high. The Beauty doesn't meet them.

There's also been a backlash against the kind of "prestige mess" that some creators have been able to get away with. Audiences are increasingly unwilling to engage with shows that treat confusion as depth or chaos as complexity. They want storytelling that respects their time. The Beauty respects nobody's time. It wastes the time of viewers, cast members, and production crews for a narrative that never coheres.

The streaming era has also democratized entertainment criticism. Not everyone writes about television professionally, but everyone with internet access can do so. This means a show like The Beauty can't hide behind critical obfuscation. It can't rely on some critics pretending it's intentionally bad or misunderstood. Too many people will see through that. The show is just bad at its job of telling a story.

Common Criticisms: Are Fans Being Unfair?

It's worth considering whether criticism of The Beauty is unfair or overly harsh. Perhaps what reads as incoherence is intentional ambiguity. Perhaps the character inconsistencies are meant to reflect some larger point about identity. Perhaps the mystery is deliberately unsolvable because that's the thematic point.

Possible, but unlikely. There's a difference between intentional ambiguity and accidental incoherence, and The Beauty reads much more like the latter. If it were intentional, there would be consistency in that intention. The show would commit to the idea that nothing makes sense as a thematic choice. Instead, it seems to expect viewers to engage with it as a coherent mystery while also treating its plot as optional.

The character inconsistencies don't feel like they're reflecting something about identity. They feel like they reflect the script changing without edits. The dialogue and behavior don't suggest the characters are unstable or changing. They suggest the characters were written by different people without coordination.

Also worth noting: the show had significant resources and expertise behind it. This isn't an underfunded indie project made with limited resources. This is a major production by an established creator with production companies and studios behind it. The failures here are failures of choice and coordination, not resource limitations.

Criticism of The Beauty isn't unfair. It's earned.

What The Beauty Could Have Been: The Road Not Taken

It's worth imagining the version of The Beauty that might have worked. If the show had committed to being a stylish thriller with clear rules about how the spa operates and what it does, if it had given its ensemble members consistent character arcs that intersected meaningfully, if it had built its mystery with information viewers could theorize about, it could have been genuinely effective.

Or if it had fully committed to being a dark comedy about the absurdity of beauty standards and wellness culture, letting the horror elements be metaphorical rather than literal, it could have been funny and pointed. Ryan Murphy at his best is funny. That's not really present here.

Or if it had decided to be a story about female desire and transformation that's messy and contradictory precisely because sexuality and identity are messy and contradictory, it could have been bold. But again, that would require committing to a thematic position and exploring it consistently.

The fact that none of these versions exist suggests The Beauty was developed without a strong central creative vision. Too many cooks, not enough clarity. Decisions were made in isolation without integration. It's a show that didn't have a leader willing to make hard choices about what it was and what it wasn't.

A show with this budget and this talent could have been remarkable. Instead, it's a cautionary tale about what happens when resources and ambition outpace clarity and discipline.

The Verdict: A Show That Collapses Under Its Own Weight

The Beauty is frustrating because it had every ingredient for success. Talented actors, beautiful production values, an intriguing premise, significant resources, and a creator with proven success. Yet somehow it manages to be worse than Murphy's previous failures because at least those failures felt intentional in some way.

This show is incoherent without being interestingly so. It's ambitious without being clear about what it's ambitious toward. It's beautiful without that beauty serving a purpose. It's mysterious without being genuinely mysterious. Every element works against every other element.

The most damning thing that can be said about The Beauty is that watching it feels like a waste of time. Not because it's slow—slow can be effective. Not because it's dark or difficult. Not because it's experimental in ways that demand patience. It feels like a waste of time because nothing that happens matters. The narrative doesn't cohere. The characters don't grow. The mysteries don't resolve in satisfying ways. Viewers invest time and get nothing back.

Ryan Murphy has built a career on taking risks and occasionally failing publicly. Those failures are usually forgivable because they come from genuine ambition. The Beauty fails in the most unforgivable way: through simple incompetence. It's a show that doesn't know what it's doing and never figures it out. For a creator of Murphy's stature working with these resources, that's not failure. That's a betrayal of the opportunity.

For viewers, The Beauty is an easy pass. There are better thrillers, better mysteries, better horror, better dark comedies, and better prestige television being made right now. Spending six hours here accomplishes nothing but frustration. The show promises mystery and delivers confusion. It promises drama and delivers inconsistency. It promises to be worth your time and breaks that promise in the first episode.

FAQ

What is The Beauty about?

The Beauty is a limited series on Hulu that follows women in a small town who become involved with a mysterious spa offering transformative treatments. The show attempts to be a thriller-mystery combining elements of body horror, supernatural intrigue, and commentary on beauty standards, though these elements are never successfully integrated into a coherent narrative.

Why is The Beauty considered a failure?

The Beauty fails fundamentally at telling a coherent story. Characters behave inconsistently, the central mystery lacks internal logic, plot threads remain unexplored or contradict themselves, and the show's various genre elements (thriller, horror, comedy) are never successfully blended. These failures aren't intentional artistic choices but rather symptoms of narrative incoherence that leaves viewers confused about basic plot mechanics.

Is The Beauty actually worse than Ryan Murphy's previous bad work?

The Beauty is worse in a specific way. Previous Murphy failures at least felt like they came from clear creative choices, even if those choices didn't work out. The Beauty feels like it was made without a coherent vision, as if different departments created elements independently without integrating them. It's incoherent rather than ambitiously failed, which makes it more frustrating than earlier misses.

What would have made The Beauty work better?

The show needed one primary thing: clarity about what it was trying to be. If it had committed to being a tightly plotted mystery thriller with consistent rules, a dark comedy about beauty standards, or a character-driven drama about female desire and transformation, it could have succeeded. Instead, it tries to be all of these simultaneously without committing to any, which results in a confused product that fails at all of them.

How does the cast feel about the show?

The talented ensemble cast appears to have done their best with inconsistent material. The actors themselves aren't the problem; their performances are often compelling. The issue is that they're working without coherent character arcs, which prevents them from delivering their best work. You can sense the actors trying to find layers that the script doesn't provide.

Does the mystery ever get solved?

The show attempts to provide answers to its central mystery in the finale, but those answers don't connect logically to what came before. Information crucial to understanding the plot is revealed only at the end, making it impossible for viewers to have theorized about or predicted the resolution. A mystery that can't be predicted because the audience was denied necessary information isn't actually a mystery.

Should I watch The Beauty if I like Ryan Murphy's work?

If you enjoyed earlier Murphy productions, The Beauty will likely frustrate rather than satisfy you. It lacks the clear creative vision that characterizes even his more ambitious failures. Watching it feels like an obligation rather than an opportunity to engage with an interesting creative experiment. Your time would be better spent revisiting Murphy's stronger work or exploring other quality television available on streaming services.

Why does The Beauty look so good if the story is so bad?

The show had significant production resources, talented cinematographers, and accomplished production designers. Visual elements were developed competently by people doing their jobs well. The failure is that these visual elements exist independently of the narrative. The spa looks beautiful but serves no story purpose. The color palette is striking but doesn't communicate thematic meaning. Good visuals can't substitute for a coherent story, and when they're clearly this high-quality while the narrative is this weak, the disconnect becomes even more glaring.

Is The Beauty worth watching for completionists?

Even for people who watch everything, The Beauty is difficult to justify. Life is short and time is finite. Spending six hours on a show that doesn't respect your time isn't a sacrifice worth making for completism. You'll gain nothing from finishing except the knowledge that you finished. The show doesn't build to anything that makes the early struggle meaningful. A completionist approach is only valuable when the work rewards that commitment, and this doesn't.

What does The Beauty's failure say about the future of prestige TV?

The Beauty suggests that simply having resources, talent, and ambition isn't enough. Television is currently demanding that shows respect their audiences' time, maintain narrative coherence, and deliver on their promises. The era where sheer prestige and spectacle could carry incoherent work seems to be ending. Quality control matters more than ever. The Beauty's failure is a sign that audiences and critics are increasingly unwilling to engage with work that mistakes style for substance.

Conclusion: A Masterclass in Wasted Opportunity

The Beauty represents something particularly frustrating in contemporary entertainment: enormous resources deployed without coherent purpose. It's the rare show where you can identify every element of production excellence—cinematography, production design, sound design, performances—while the whole thing crumbles due to narrative incompetence.

Ryan Murphy has built a legacy on pushing boundaries and taking risks. Some of those risks have paid off spectacularly. Some have failed interestingly. The Beauty is neither. It's a risk that failed uninterestingly through basic storytelling incompetence. That's not brave. It's not even interesting. It's just disappointing.

For viewers, The Beauty is an easy recommendation to avoid. For Murphy, it should serve as a wake-up call about the importance of narrative clarity and coherence. You can't substitute spectacle for story indefinitely. Eventually, audiences want to know what they've been watching and why they should care.

The best thing The Beauty accomplishes is making previous Murphy failures look intentional by comparison. For a show with this much going for it, that's perhaps the highest insult: it makes you nostalgic for his failures that at least knew what they were doing wrong.

Key Takeaways

• The Beauty fails through narrative incoherence rather than ambitious failure, making it worse than Murphy's previous missteps
• Character inconsistencies and plot contradictions suggest multiple uncoordinated writers rather than intentional confusion
• Talented ensemble cast and beautiful cinematography can't compensate for a central mystery that lacks internal logic
• The show mistakes visual spectacle and stylistic flourishes for actual storytelling substance
• Murphy's work increasingly prioritizes production value over narrative clarity as resources have expanded

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