From its opening scene, Ryan Murphy’s new series, The Beauty, is a high-octane gore fest set in the world of supermodels. Real-life model Bella Hadid is strutting a Milan catwalk before going off-script and off-kilter. Sweating and confused, she desperately claws at the audience, begging for water, before launching an all-out attack on people in the street.
It’s violent and visceral, all high-fashion decorum out the window as bodies start piling up, and the police circle the panting, sweating model. Then she explodes.
With FBI agents played by Evan Peters (Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story) and Rebecca Hall assigned to the case, we soon discover that Hadid’s character is not the only beautiful person blowing up.
Models around the world have died in what we learn is the result of a secretive cosmetic procedure that causes people to tear apart their normal, average, far less beautiful skin-suits so their new selves can emerge. Then it starts spreading. Like the virus in the horror film It Follows, this one is sexually transmitted. Smelling the potential of selling the Cure For Ugly, shady pharmaceutical entrepreneurs start sniffing around, eager to get the world hooked on looks.
From the moment the trailer dropped, the obvious comparisons were made. To the prevalence of weight loss drugs like Ozempic, which is name-dropped thrice in the series’ first four episodes. And to Coralie Fargeat’s 2024 satirical body horror film The Substance, in which a drug on the black market promises the cure for ageing and irrelevance.
That last comparison is particularly awkward for Ashton Kutcher, who plays a billionaire funding a black-market version of the titular drug in this new series, and is the real-life ex-husband of Demi Moore, the Oscar-nominated star of The Substance. But, having now seen the show, are the two works really so similar?
Is The Beauty just a new version of The Substance?
The similarities are undeniable, but The Beauty distinguishes itself through Murphy’s signature maximalist approach and broader satirical scope.
Where The Substance focused intimately on one woman’s descent into body horror as a way to discuss how Hollywood replaces “expired” talent with younger models, The Beauty explodes the premise into a global pandemic thriller that examines vanity as contagion. It’s less psychologically claustrophobic and more epidemiologically ambitious, with classic Murphy-esque shock tactics thrown in for good measure.
The casting is also deliciously meta. Alongside Hadid’s combustible opening, the show features superstar model Amelia Gray Hamlin (daughter of Real Housewives star Lisa Rinna and the ex-girlfriend of Kardashian baby daddy Scott Disick) and Nicola Peltz Beckham. Most notably, Isabella Rossellini’s spot on the cast recalls her iconic turn in 1992’s Death Becomes Her, another cautionary tale about the lethal pursuit of eternal youth and beauty. The show understands its lineage.
For Murphy devotees, The Beauty feels like a spiritual successor to his breakout medical drama, Nip/Tuck, which ran from 2003 to 2010. That series also interrogated America’s obsession with physical perfection through extreme cosmetic procedures, though it traded gore for psychological manipulation. The Beauty takes those themes and cranks them to 11, replacing scalpels with skin-melting self-combustion.
Importantly, The Beauty is also based on a 2015 comic book series by Jeremy Haun and Jason A. Hurley. Murphy and series co-creator Matthew Hodgson optioned the rights nearly a decade ago, long before the release of The Substance.
What have the cast and creatives said about it?
When Vanity Fair asked about the similarities between the two works, Kutcher sheepishly admitted to not having seen The Substance. But in a subsequent interview with Entertainment Tonight, he praised his ex for her work and quickly zoomed out to connect the themes to his personal experiences.
“I started modelling when I was, like, 19, and what I realised really quickly is that everybody had an insecurity,” he said. “You look in the mirror long enough, you’ll find something you don’t like.”
Murphy – fresh from the headline-grabbing first season of legal drama All’s Fair – has also spoken about The Beauty’s take on what he calls “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”.
The creators of the comic pitched it simply: an STD that makes you beautiful.
“We’re obsessed with outward beauty. It’s … a bit of a problem,” Haun told publisher Image Comics.
“We see all of that [who] are willing to do anything to be beautiful – perfect. People are going on crash diets, doing extreme fad exercise plans, and getting elective surgeries right and left. I looked at all of that and wanted to examine exactly how far we’d go to look beautiful.
“Would we be willing to catch a disease? In a lot of cases, I think the answer would be yes.”
Why Hollywood has a history of double-ups
The phenomenon of similar projects arriving simultaneously is a curious Hollywood quirk.
In 1998, both Antz and A Bug’s Life arrived within weeks of each other, both computer-animated films about individualistic insects challenging conformity. The same year gave audiences two asteroid disaster films: Armageddon and Deep Impact. A year earlier, Dante’s Peak and Volcano erupted months apart. The phenomenon intensified in 2005 with duelling Truman Capote biopics: Capote and Infamous, which both examined the writer’s work on In Cold Blood, competing for the same awards and audience.
This can sometimes occur because studios monitor each other’s development slates, and when one project gains momentum, competitors rush similar concepts into production. The fear of being beaten to market often accelerates rather than halts production. But it can also be a coincidence borne from the zeitgeist. Writers and producers respond to the same cultural currents, the same headlines, the same collective anxieties.
For The Beauty and The Substance, the timing appears genuinely coincidental – one a nearly decade-long journey from comic to screen, the other an auteur’s standalone vision. That both arrived to speak to our current moment of Ozempic, Instagram filters and the normalisation of cosmetic procedures suggests they’re symptoms of the same cultural diagnosis.
The Beauty premieres January 22 on Disney+.
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