The Beauty Premiere Review: A Twisted, Addictive Mystery in Designer Packaging
FX’s The Beauty comes out of the gate swinging. The three-episode premiere is glossy, gruesome, and weirdly hypnotic, a high-fashion body-horror mystery that treats “perfection” like a contagion and tracks the fallout with real momentum. A few threads wobble along the way, but the hook lands, the visuals hit hard, and the series already suggests a deeper conspiracy under the blood-slick surface.
The Beauty | Photo Credit: FX
Evan Peters, recalibrated
Evan Peters has spent years as a reliable conduit for Ryan Murphy intensity, and The Beauty shifts him into a different, equally compelling register. As FBI agent Cooper Madsen, he’s asked to carry the show’s physical grammar, a role built around motion, procedure, and stamina. Across the first three episodes, he stays grounded, and that steadiness becomes its own kind of tension as the series keeps sliding deeper into the grotesque.
That restraint matters, because the premise is wild by design. Cooper and his partner Jordan Bennett (Rebecca Hall) chase a trail of model deaths and violent transformations across Europe, and Peters keeps the investigative spine believable even when the imagery turns operatic. Hall, even in limited bursts, sharpens the dynamic with a cool, controlled edge. Together, they give the show a human anchor with just enough texture to hold it steady while everything around them gets bigger, stranger, and meaner.
A familiar obsession, built into a strong playground
On paper, The Beauty invites comparisons to recent body-horror and culture satire. It doesn’t shy away from that neighborhood, but it doesn’t get stuck there either. The show takes a recognizable fear, the cost of perfection, the hunger to become someone “better,” and builds a world around it that feels expansive enough to keep surprising you.
The hook here is also simple and vicious: a sexually transmitted infection that transforms people into physically “perfect” versions of themselves, followed by consequences so brutal they turn runway glamour into a crime scene. The transformation language is especially gnarly, all feverish panic and body rebellion, with a cocoon-like stage that feels half medical nightmare, half designer horror.
What keeps it from feeling like a one-idea shock machine is the infrastructure around the concept. Beauty culture here takes shape in several forms and industries. Fashion, tech, medicine, and money collide quickly, giving the show room to move between satire, thriller mechanics, and creature-feature nastiness without having to reintroduce its premise every time it wants to escalate.
The mystery has teeth
Three episodes in, the series has already planted a question that carries real pull: how deep does this really go? The premiere’s early chaos, a model rampaging through Paris before the night curdles into something far worse, kicks Cooper and Jordan into an investigation that feels like it keeps finding new doors when you expect a dead end.
As the scope widens, the story starts to show its real interests. There’s a human desperation thread running through the case, ugly and occasionally darkly funny in the way reinvention can be, especially when it’s fueled by resentment. Then there’s the corporate angle: an ultra-wealthy figure known as The Corporation, his “stable” version of The Beauty, and the clear incentive to contain the strain that can’t be controlled. With an assassin orbiting the edges, the show starts to read like a conspiracy thriller wearing a couture mask.
Momentum is the glue. The premiere keeps feeding you answers in careful increments, keeping the story clear while still leaving you hungry for more.
A gorgeous nightmare, even when the Script wobbles
The craftsmanship behind the camera does a lot of heavy lifting, in the best way. The Beauty is visually striking: fashion imagery turned predatory, sterile labs that feel confessional, city streets filmed with a slick dread that makes every reflection look suspicious. The third episode dips a bit, mostly when the writing starts over-explaining its ideas or spelling out character perspectives that would land harder if the show trusted subtext. A few of those beats also tilt into oddly heightened, sometimes sexually charged emphasis, which can feel distracting rather than revealing.
Even then, the visual detailing keeps the hour watchable, turning atmosphere into its own kind of propulsion. Dropping three episodes at once helps, too. The show uses that runway pace to stack reveals while keeping the central question intact, giving viewers enough to chew on now and enough withheld to make the next week feel tempting.
Score: 7/10
As a three-episode launch, The Beauty is entertaining and visually dialed-in, with enough mystery to keep you coming back even as a few early wrinkles show.
