The Beauty is an opulent spectacle that is so profoundly addictive and completely captivating that it is, without a doubt, Ryan Murphy's best project to date.

Ryan Murphy’s deliciously demented new series zips past “The Substance” to deliver its own serial-killing take on body horror. It’s a dose of fresh hell for the Ozempic era.

The Beauty puts all of its ideas on the surface of the story, leaving little room for interpretation or ambiguity. But it’s so entertaining—and feels so timely without being a doomy drag—that it seems uncharitable to complain that it isn’t a masterpiece.

In a cascading series of unmotivated twists, enemies team up, a villain has an unconvincing change of heart and the whole thing ends on a frustrating cliffhanger. But give Murphy and company credit: “The Beauty” may be semi-hollow headed, but it’s never boring.

The Beauty is about as subtle as a root canal without Novocain, but thankfully it’s a lot more fun. If you can stomach it.

“The Beauty” merely reinforces Murphy’s distasteful infatuation with mixing nudity, violence and (several times) nude violence—a sort of Reese’s peanut butter cup that puts lurid taste treats together.

The production design and color palette are simultaneously ostentatious and bland, and rather than keeping the virus’s origins mysterious and focusing instead on its societal implications, the series lays out a rudimentary global conspiracy. .... The characters, when they’re not cliché-ridden blank slates, are universally reprehensible, and neither psychologically complex nor funny enough to sustain our interest.