The Prodigy’s “Firestarter” blares as a supermodel (Bella Hadid) in red leather wreaks havoc on a Parisian runway, snapping necks, battering paparazzi. She mounts a motorbike only to be T-boned by oncoming traffic – her own bone jutting through skin, then miraculously healing – before literally exploding in a shower of viscera as armed gendarmes close in. It’s propulsive Grand Guignol, and it’s how The Beauty – co-created by Nip/Tuck’s Ryan Murphy – announces itself.
Part body horror, part sci-fi conspiracy thriller, part allegory about beauty standards, the series is based on a 2015 comic book by American artists Jeremy Haun and Jason A Hurley. It centres on a drug that guarantees beauty (“one shot and you’re hot”) but is not without side-effects. Not only is this supposed elixir often lethal, it’s a sexually transmitted contagion – and since recipients become impossibly attractive, it spreads rapidly.
