Watching 'The Beauty' Between GLP-1 Ads Feels Like the Point

I made the fatal mistake of watching FX’s The Beauty while eating. Ryan Murphy’s latest addition to his ever-expanding trophy case is a body-horror spectacle that’s glossy, grotesque, and only moderately pornographic — which, somehow, makes it even more unsettling. 

Set in a near-future world where beauty is no longer just currency but rather a compulsory transformation, The Beauty centers on a sexually-transmitted disease that is morphing infected individuals into their ideal, most ‘beautiful’ selves. It promises extreme attractiveness at an equally extreme cost. Bones break. Bodies warp. Pain is reframed as progress. 

And everyone involved is left wondering if it’s worth it. 

What made The Beauty impossible to ignore wasn’t just what was happening on screen — it was the irony during the commercial breaks. GLP-1 ads. Weight-loss injections promising control, ease, and transformation, neatly packaged between artful scenes of bodies being broken and rebuilt in the name of beauty. 

The irony was almost too exacting. It’s surgical. 

Watching The Beauty while being marketed pharmaceutical thinness felt less like contrast and more like confirmation. The show’s world doesn’t exist in opposition to ours — it exists as an exaggeration of it, on a plane parallel to it. Pain is simply rebranded as optimization, and transformation is framed as divine responsibility. 

The message is the same on both sides of the screen: if your body isn’t desirable, it’s because you haven’t tried hard enough. So try harder. 

If American Horror Story taught us anything, it’s that Murphy has always been fascinated by the body: how it’s controlled, punished, fetishized, marketed. From Murder House to Freak Show to Hotel, AHS treated physical difference and excess as both horror and spectacle. The Beauty feels like the logical next step — less haunted house, more mirror held directly up to the audience.

Look here. You’re the star now. 

Apparently, 2026 is the year we decided to make body horror sexy. But unlike AHS, which often leaned into shock for shock’s sake, The Beauty feels colder, sharper, and more unsettling — precisely because of its restraint. The horror isn’t supernatural; it’s systemic. There are no ghosts here, only incentives.

This shift mirrors Murphy’s evolution. In AHS: Cult, fear was no longer supernatural but ideological. In AHS: NYC, the true monster wasn’t a killer but a system that punished queer bodies through neglect and invisibility. Now, The Beauty pushes that logic further. Because the body isn’t just endangered by power anymore — it’s shaped by it.

From AHS: Freak Show, where physical difference was literalized as spectacle, to AHS: Hotel, where beauty, youth, and sex were treated as currency, Murphy has always returned to the same question: who gets to be desirable, and at what cost?

The Beauty feels like the answer he’s been reaching for.

Murphy’s new show interrogates an uncomfortable truth: maybe beauty really is pain. And maybe people will go to any length to be desired, safe, or powerful in a world that rewards appearance above all else. That discomfort doesn’t come from the gore itself, but from how recognizable the motivations are. 

These characters aren’t monsters. They’re consumers. 

“Let’s break some bones,” one character says, turning bodily destruction into a lifestyle slogan. Another counters with pure nihilism: “The world is on fire. Live, laugh, and fuck.” Between those two philosophies lies The Beauty’s moral universe — suspended somewhere between determinism, nihilism, and surrender.

In that sense, The Beauty feels like a response to American Horror Story’s legacy. Where AHS externalized fear through villains, curses, and spectacle, The Beauty internalizes it. The enemy isn’t a monster lurking in the shadows — it’s the cultural logic that tells us suffering is a small price to pay for desirability.

It’s giving, I’ll break my nose so you’ll want to take my clothes off. Which sounds just ridiculous enough to be true. 

Murphy’s signature excess is still here: heightened aesthetics, unimaginable gore, captivating performances, and an obsession with surfaces. But this time, the excess feels intentional rather than indulgent. The Beauty knows it’s complicit in the culture it critiques, selling desire even as it warns us about it. 

And maybe that’s what makes it effective. The show doesn’t offer resistance or redemption. It offers recognition. It asks whether this obsession was inevitable — or whether we keep choosing it, even when we know the cost. 

By the end, the question isn’t whether beauty is worth the pain. It’s whether we ever truly believed it wasn’t.

Either way, The Beauty marks a turning point. Not just in Murphy’s body-horror canon, but in how television is willing to confront the economics of desire itself.