'The Beauty': Everything To Know

Ryan Murphy is busy. Over a ten-day stretch in 2024, for example, he released four new shows: American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez, Grotesquerie, Monsters: The Lyle And Erik Menendez Story, and Doctor Odyssey. In 2025, he was also involved in Mid-Century Modern, All’s Fair, and 9-1-1: Nashville.

He’ll have a big 2026, too. Set to drop soon is The Beauty, a new FX series that, in his words, takes on “Ozempic culture.” The show is based on a comic book series by Jeremy Haun and Jason A. Hurley.

Ahead of the show’s release, keep reading for everything you need to know before it comes to TV.

Plot

An official description reads:

“In FX’s The Beauty, the world of high fashion turns dark when international supermodels begin dying in gruesome and mysterious ways. FBI Agents Cooper Madsen and Jordan Bennett are sent to Paris to uncover the truth. As they delve deeper into the case, they uncover a sexually transmitted virus that transforms ordinary people into visions of physical perfection, but with terrifying consequences. Their path leads them directly into the crosshairs of The Corporation, a shadowy tech billionaire who has secretly engineered a miracle drug dubbed The Beauty, who will do anything to protect his trillion-dollar empire — including unleashing his lethal enforcer, The Assassin. As the epidemic spreads, Jeremy, a desperate outsider, is caught in the chaos, searching for purpose as the agents race across Paris, Venice, Rome, and New York to stop a threat that could alter the future of humanity.”

A synopsis of the original comic book also says, “Modern society is obsessed with outward beauty. What if there was a way to guarantee you could become more and more beautiful every day? What if it was a sexually transmitted disease? In the world of The Beauty, physical perfection is attainable. The vast majority of the population has taken advantage of it, but Detectives Foster and Vaughn will soon discover it comes at a terrible price.”

Murphy previously spoke to Variety about the show, saying:

“It’s something I’ve never done before, which is a sci-fi medical show about a new virus that mutates and it’s sexually transmitted, that turns you into your absolute perfect self. And the question is, how far would you go to be beautiful? What would you sacrifice to that, and does that matter? That show was looking at, I call it the Ozempic culture. One little shot, and suddenly you’re going to look better and feel better, and all your problems are going to go away. But what are you really working on? What’s going on with you that you feel you need to do that? Sometimes it is health, sometimes it’s vanity.”

Cast

The show stars Evan Peters, Anthony Ramos, Jeremy Pope, Rebecca Hall, and Ashton Kutcher.

Murphy told Variety that he had long wanted to work with Ramos and Kutcher. He also said to Entertainment Weekly he was “going all over the world” in 2025 to make the show, calling it “a very long shoot.”

Murphy added:

“I’ve always written about beauty culture in my work from my very first big thing, which was Nip/Tuck. I’ve also done a lot of body horror in my work, mostly through American Horror Story. I just think that it asks that deep essential question that I always like to ask about anything: What would you do for love? What would you do for beauty? What would you do for money? It has all of those things that I’ve grappled with in my entire career, all in one package.”