Caution: Side effects include painful rolling of eyes and death from boredom
Through The Beauty’s clumsily structured first season, we follow cartoonishly greedy pharma bro Byron, whose only personality trait is a massive black hole where humanity is supposed to reside. In these times of corporate sociopathy elevated to aspirational fame, the problem with a character like Byron isn’t a lack of realism (hell knows the real world has more than its share of narcissistic buffoons), but the fact that his evil is played as a joke. As necessary as it is to counter the ego of the über-rich with relentless ridicule, The Beauty strikes the wrong tone: we should be laughing at this villain, but actor Ashton Kutcher’s contagious charisma invites the viewer to laugh with him.
Byron’s newest business plan is a drug that completely remakes the human body with some genetic technobabble. One injection cures all diseases, fixes the metabolism, stops natural aging, and—here’s the selling point—makes the patient look impossibly sexy. I marvel at the difficulties this show’s casting director must have had in selecting only the hottest of the hottest supermodels for the dozens of extras that showcase the wonders this drug produces. Just a little problem: the miracle beauty drug ends up raising your body temperature until you literally explode. Not that that’s going to deter Byron from his goal of squeezing the world out of a fortune.
(This gruesome detail has a distant basis in reality: in the 1930s, one of the first anti-obesity pills contained 2,4-dinitrophenol, a molecule that interferes with the body’s ability to extract energy from its reserves. As a result, more and more fat needs to be burned in order to maintain basic biological functions, which of course reduces the amount of stored fat, but all that extra burning causes internal overheating that can easily get lethal. The molecule was banned.)
Watching The Beauty, it takes a while to piece together exactly how things started to go wrong for Byron’s company. In the season’s many ineptly misplaced flashbacks, we eventually discover that it was one of his lab technicians who leaked the miracle drug to the world before Byron was ready to start charging for it. It turns out that The Beauty® is sexually transmissible, which creates a snowballing problem: each formerly normal, newly super-attractive person jumps at the chance to seduce lots of partners, each of which is in turn transformed and then proceeds to similarly propagate the molecule. So now lots of people are becoming beautiful without paying Byron, and also, lots of people are randomly exploding like Tetsuo from Akira all over the world, which threatens to bring a massive PR crisis at Byron’s doorstep.
What does Byron do to contain the epidemic of gorgeousness? Why, he hires a professional assassin, as you do. In fact, this is how we start the story: we follow two FBI agents who have been investigating a series of mysterious deaths of beautiful people across Europe. Things get complicated when one of the FBI agents has a one-night stand and is transformed into another sex bomb. Now she has to get to the bottom of this medical mystery before she blows up too.
It‘s strange that so much of this show happens in secret. We’re not shown how the press reacts to high-profile people exploding, or how the common people feel about the rumors that surely must circulate concerning an STD that makes you hot. It’s especially out of character for someone as egocentric as Byron to never give an interview about his vision for humanity.
The Beauty has the ingredients for a compelling story, but has no idea how to cook them. It has nothing to say about the social harms of lookism and the pharmaceutical exploitation of people’s insecurities that The Substance didn’t say better. Its embarrassingly preachy dialogues sound copy-pasted from incel forums. Each episode rehashes the same yucky sequence of a new victim receiving the molecule and being painfully transformed via convulsive contortionism. When the best character in the show, Byron’s delightfully vitriolic wife, is given the treatment against her will and then attempts suicide, Byron’s change of heart feels hollow because he had never shown any concern for her before. And his hired assassin turns a target into his apprentice for no comprehensible reason.
The Beauty is an uninspired The Substance wannabe with far less bite, a juvenile sense of humor and zero awareness of the times. Yes, we know that obsession with beauty is dangerous. The show doesn’t have any more points to make after that, and it gets tiresome to watch a string of tertiary characters frantically throw themselves at the walls for ten minutes while the drug works its Cronenberg-lite magic. One wishes they could skip the grimacing part and blow up already.
Nerd Coefficient: 4/10.
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.