The Beauty isn’t just my nickname here at The Irish Times. It’s also the new show from American telly auteur Ryan “Two Surnames” Murphy.
The series begins with leather-clad supermodel Bella Hadid doing a circuit on the catwalk, feeling a little hot, wrenching water from a stunned bystander and consequently going on a bloody murderous rampage, followed by a motorcycle chase, followed by the commission of several violent murders, followed by literally exploding into a gentle mist of blood and guts. Classic Hadid. Great opening. No notes.
The Beauty (Disney+) is about a sexually transmitted disease that makes people really sexy. “Why, that’s as ridiculous as injecting botulism into your face!” says you.
It’s classic Ryan Murphy, in fairness. Nobody’s going to mistake this premise for a show by Jimmy McGovern or the Children’s Television Workshop. Lord Reith never said, “I want to see dramas about sexually transmitted diseases that make people sexy,” when he was establishing the BBC.
But, once again, Murphy is asking the big questions. Questions like: is hydration important? And: what if sexy people got so hot they exploded? (This is, as you can imagine, a real fear for hot people like me.)
The Beauty is perfectly daft. It is, essentially, David Cronenberg’s Zoolander, a programme that simultaneously makes the notion of beauty seem like the most important and the stupidest thing in the world by having a succession of beautiful people, each better-looking than the last, go on a murderous rampage and then explode.
It’s a genre that Murphy first explored in Nip/Tuck many years ago – camp body horror – and it should really have been titled Exploding Hunks.
After Bella Hadid explodes, a violent, porn-addled incel forces a rogue cosmetic surgeon with huge self-inflicted cheeks to beautify him at gunpoint. The doctor does so by procuring a sexy veiled lady for the incel to have sex with (you can’t get this on the HSE), after which he contracts the aforementioned virus.
The incel ends up sweating himself into a horrible, pulsating cocoon like a schlubby caterpillar before emerging as a magnificent hunky butterfly – though picture a butterfly with glistening, muscular buttocks.
The Beauty: Rebecca Hall as Jordan Bennett, Evan Peters as Cooper Madsen. Photograph: Philippe Antonello/FX/Disney+
After several beautiful hunks explode (the hunkmanity!) the feds are called in to investigate – you can’t just have hunks explode willy-nilly without the deep state getting involved, you see. Dramatically speaking, it’s important these law-enforcement characters are run-of-the mill, ordinary-looking folk. Otherwise the conceit of this show wouldn’t quite land. In fact, it would seem totally ridiculous.
Luckily, these agents are played by those notorious uggos Rebecca Hall and Evan Peters. I mean, ugh, look at them. They’re grotesque. Luckily, in the second episode Rebecca Hall ends up contracting the beauty virus, and because Rebecca Hall is, as we’ve established, hideous to the eye, she is replaced by another actor, Jessica Alexander, when she emerges from her smouldering flesh cocoon.
“That’s much better,” we all say with relief, tired of staring at Rebecca Hall, who, before this show put me straight, we might have thought to be one of the more attractive Hollywood stars.
I guess it would be a bit much to expect a Hollywood writer with two whole surnames to exhibit restraint. The Beauty is redolent of many other shows that plume from the chimneys of the Ryan Murphy industrial complex. We have long, sweaty sex scenes. There are extended violent fight scenes. We have on-the-nose homilies on the social benefits of attractiveness (or off-the-nose homilies, depending on the nature of the character’s cosmetic-surgery profile).
Vacuous fashionistas discuss beauty treatments. A monocular Patrick Batemanesque serial killer listens to Easy Lover by Phil Collins and Philip Bailey as he tortures a hunk. (Easy Lover is surely torture enough, says you.) And Ashton Kutcher, a secretly very old man who is very attractive, is orally pleasured while demanding yacht rock on his actual yacht. (I feel a class action coming on from yacht-rock enthusiasts.)
Like much of Murphy’s output, The Beauty has the shape of satire while never making it entirely clear what’s being satirised. Is he targeting the beauty industry upon which so many of his actors depend in order to get parts in shows like this one? Or is he critiquing the naive, silly people who wring their hands about the beauty industry in papers like this? Or perhaps the target is Ryan Murphy himself, whom I increasingly assume is some sort of glitter-covered algorithm churning out shows on the hour.
Law enforcement agents are played by those notorious uggos Rebecca Hall and Evan Peters. I mean, ugh, look at them. Photograph: Philippe Antonello/FX/Disney+ 
The Beauty: Ashton Kutcher as the Corporation. Photograph: Eric Liebowitz/FX/Disney+
Of course, really attractive people will watch the show with clearer and more crystal-blue eyes than the typical Igors and Chewbaccas who read this newspaper. And those of us from the actual hunk community will watch with growing worry. Do I feel a little hot? Do I feel a teensy bit murderous? Do I feel like I might eviscerate someone for a bottle of water and then explode, sending my guts flying everywhere? My doctor says no, but these are legitimate questions nonetheless.
Marvel Studios is now in its self-absorbed, psychoanalytical phase and has begun making shows that essentially lampoon the production of Marvel shows while wondering desperately about their wider purpose. The underlying thesis of Wonder Man, its new miniseries, seems to be: “Look, we’re sick of superhero properties too.” You see, our hero, Simon Williams (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), is an actor auditioning to play Wonder Man in a film before turning out to be superpowered and becoming Wonder Man for real.
In the first episode Simon watches actual clips of John Schlesinger’s classic, heartbreaking Midnight Cowboy with sadness in his eyes before he goes to his audition.
The Wonder Man film is being made by a fictional director who is leaving art-house cinema behind for franchise megabucks. At one point this director makes high claims for the possibilities of the superhero genre, suggesting that the best way to tell any story today is via the medium of superheroic tomfoolery.
Wonder Man: Ben Kingsley as Trevor Slattery and Yahya Adbul-Mateen II as Simon Williams/Wonder Man. Photograph: Suzanne Tenner/Marvel/Disney+
To be honest, it feels like a melancholy critique of the whole enterprise. Indeed, in keeping with the established excesses of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Ben Kingsley is also in the cast, playing the same character he played in Iron Man 3. And so Ben Kingsley’s character from Iron Man 3 watches Midnight Cowboy too with what look like actual tears in his eyes.
This feels like a cry for help. I know this show has human creators, in Destin Daniel Cretton and Andrew Guest, but it’s hard not to conclude while watching that Marvel Studios has become sentient as it ages and is feeling deep remorse for what it has done to cinema. To paraphrase WB Yeats, a terrible beauty hits middle age.
That’s also, for the record, what they say here when I walk into the office.