In the new Ryan Murphy horror thriller “The Beauty,” a virus turns its hosts into perfect physical specimens overnight. Men wake up with rippling biceps, Hawaiian-roll abs, and the kind of jawline even other men notice. Women emerge youthful and thin (of course), with Disney-princess eyes and movie-star lips. A biotech C.E.O. named Byron Forst (Ashton Kutcher) packages the pathogen as The Beauty, which he calls an “injectable Instagram filter”—though it doesn’t enhance one’s features so much as transform them entirely, rendering the infected unrecognizable to their friends and family. Another side effect: these supermodel selves can only survive for about two years, before a literal hotness causes them to spontaneously combust.

The series, on FX, is loosely based on a 2016 graphic novel of the same name by Jeremy Haun and Jason A. Hurley, about an appearance-optimizing S.T.D. that people actually want to catch. “The Beauty” is as implausible as it is familiar in form—its protagonists are a pair of jet-setting F.B.I. agents tasked with investigating the mysterious deaths of models in Paris and Venice—but Murphy, with his co-creator Matt Hodgson, has retooled the premise for the Ozempic age, cannily distilling fresh societal anxieties around GLP-1 drugs. Among other concerns, the show plays with the notion that these treatments constitute a sort of shortcut: as the tagline has it, “One shot makes you hot.” The timeliness lends the first few episodes an unusual energy. Ozempic and its chief competitor, Mounjaro, are name-checked in multiple episodes; so are incels and Chads.

As that mélange suggests, the show arrives during a particularly confusing time for beauty discourse. Thanks in part to Ozempic, thin is back in, with once-plus-size celebrities sporting svelter physiques, and some already-slim stars now verging on gaunt. The drug itself has become a metonym for the increasing malleability of our appearances, which can be altered via operations, injections, or digital filters—all more normalized than ever before. (Murphy, who made his name in the early two-thousands with “Nip/Tuck,” a black comedy set at a plastic-surgery center, was perhaps ahead of the curve.) The regressive swing away from body positivity has been much discussed, but there’s no consensus on how to discuss it. Hollywood, which may be ceding its ability to set beauty standards to social media, has responded to the morass with lazy morality tales, like the 2024 movie “The Substance.” That same year, the cult classic “Death Becomes Her”—another story of eternal youth secured at a cost—was adapted for Broadway. Both films are winked at in “The Beauty,” which, like so many of Murphy’s shows, is pastiche held together by proud vulgarity and a sadistic streak.

Though GLP-1s have reportedly been tried by an eighth of the U.S. population, celebrities remain the face of the phenomenon. In the early days of the drugs’ rollout, a high price tag and a nationwide shortage made off-label A-list users a target of self-righteous mockery. “The Beauty” trades on this resentment. Meghan Trainor—a pop star who was best known for celebrating her curves, then received widespread backlash for trimming down—plays a character who’s thrown out of the window of a skyscraper. Virus-induced transformations are yet more gruesome, as bones crunch and skeletons contort for maximal discomfort. The show is built around the spectacle of punishing the excessively vain.

But “The Beauty” isn’t just an exercise in chastisement. It also explores another demographic interested in aggressive aesthetic interventions—young, alienated men. Their plight is embodied by an emotionally stunted incel named Jeremy (played first by Jaquel Spivey, then, once Beautified, by Jeremy Pope), who’s desperate for human connection. The pilot mines humor from his gullibility and cluelessness: to a plastic surgeon who sees him as an easy mark, Jeremy confesses, “I’m lost. I want to have a purpose. Do you think I should do standup?” The manosphere tends not to be considered in the same breath as Ozempic culture, but Jeremy bridges the gap while making a fascinating contrast to the Beauty’s other victims. Even as he’s pulled into the intrigue, he remains a poignantly impressionable figure, convinced that his newfound Chadness will give him a sense of meaning.

As the season progresses, demand for the Beauty grows beyond what its official provider can offer—something that’s already happened to Ozempic and Mounjaro, whose makers now compete with cheaper gray-market formulas. “The Beauty” is most engaging when it dramatizes the difference, showing the experience of an affluent client who has access to the sanctioned version versus what someone with fewer resources has to settle for. Kutcher gradually emerges as the season’s M.V.P., not least because of the believable blitheness with which Forst schemes to maximize his own profit—and brags about partying in Capri with “Jeff and Lauren.”

None of this quite hangs together, but it may not have to. “The Beauty” arrives on the heels of the Kim Kardashian vehicle “All’s Fair,” about a law firm led by flamboyant female divorce attorneys, which earned Ryan Murphy some of the worst reviews of his career. It proved enormously popular anyway, earning record viewership for Hulu, and has been renewed for a second season. (A hate-watch is still a watch.) The two shows share a latter-day Murphy impulse: to craft series with clipability in mind. That Meghan Trainor scene, which happens to take place in the Condé Nast cafeteria? I couldn’t wait to send a ten-second version to my media-industry friends as soon as the episode débuted.

Television has always relied on big, gasp-inducing moments, but Murphy crams them in even at the expense of narrative cohesion. “The Beauty” ’s eleven episodes feature dozens of named characters, and some, like Trainor’s, appear to exist solely to try to make a scene go viral. So it goes with Murphy’s knack for stunt casting, which largely pays off here, with Bella Hadid stomping down a runway as a model gone berserk and Isabella Rossellini swanning about as Forst’s scornful, gracefully ageing wife—a timeless Etruscan vase next to a can of Monster Energy. But, unlike the references to modern beauty and diet culture, which feel organically woven into the story, the guest-star appearances feel forced, as if TV, too, has to transform into something else to stay relevant.

That sense of diminishment is almost built into “The Beauty,” which is further compromised by the need to recast characters after they undergo the procedure. Evan Peters and Rebecca Hall, who play the law-enforcement partners leading the investigation, have a natural chemistry that’s promptly squandered when Hall’s character gets infected and turns into a younger, supposedly more attractive version of herself. (Hall is much missed for the rest of the season.) The pattern repeats itself with worse outcomes throughout, as seasoned actors are replaced by newcomers with none of their predecessors’ gravitas. Murphy’s desperate bid for attention has reduced him to this: a show that puts an expiration date on its own appeal. ♦