My first real writing about television was recapping episodes of Nip/Tuck. I can’t recall exactly which season exactly. What I can say for sure is it wasn’t early, when the series was at its best. That bit is a recurring theme in Ryan Murphy’s television projects. He goes for broke from jump street, leaving almost nothing in the tank for subsequent seasons. And yet, the subsequent seasons still come. That’s why Glee is such a compelling and queasy cultural item, and his American Horror Story anthology has given him the highest hit-to-miss ratio of his career. That bodes poorly for the future of his newest, The Beauty, which refuses to finish its story in 11 episodes. But for now, it is a goopy, cruel, and thrilling corker.

Loosely adapted from a comic by Jeremy Haun and Jason A. Hurley, the show takes us to a very near future. Byron Frost (Ashton Kutcher), known as the Corporation to his employee The Assassin (Anthony Ramos), has created a “wonder” drug. Dubbed “The Beauty” (like the title!), it makes you your sexiest self. Unexpectedly, a side effect of the jab is a virus. Those directly exposed don’t generally have an issue with it, but the secondary exposures are less predictable. Some end up dead sexy, others end up dead. The rare cases end up strange, exhibiting side effects from being de-aged to preadolescence to extensive deformities.

When a runway model (Bella Hadid) goes on a rampage before exploding in public, it alerts the FBI to an until then unnoticed trend: beautiful people bursting. Agents Cooper Madsen (Evan Peters) and Jordan Bennett (Rebecca Hall) get the case, jet-setting from Paris to Venice while enjoying their “casual” sexual relationship. It doesn’t take long before their investment in the situation goes beyond the professional.

There are several things The Beauty does well. The episode’s opening action sequence is a nice reminder that Murphy has an eye for directing that is sometimes easy to forget. No one should book him for the next John Wick spinoff, but he has a strong sense of how to make the pursuit of Hadid’s crazed model read well on TV screens. It is throwback-y in an appealing way, right down to the use of The Prodigy’s “Firestarter” as the needle drop. The other directors—Michael Uppendahl, Alexis Martin Woodall, and Crystle Roberson Dorsey—generally reach the bar Murphy sets in the first and third episodes.

The series also feels in the pocket when it comes to body horror and gore. There is plenty of viscera and rended flesh, for sure. Again, the effects generally work well for TV screens. However, The Beauty accomplishes as much, if not more, with camera angles, sound effects, and a game collection of actors willing to toss, turn, and contort themselves through transformations.

In the rare moments the series does touch on something near subtlety, it manages some notable moments. For instance, late in season 1, a high schooler undergoes The Beauty. She emerges on the other side, taller, leaner, and blonder. However, what she searches for, what truly delights her, is her new nose. It is both beautiful and troubling, a reminder of how something relatively small can bring joy or deliver a lifelong laceration to one’s self-esteem.

Finally, as one would expect, there is the snark quotient. This is a Murphy-penned production (he co-writes here with Matthew Hodgson, a collaborator from all the way back to the Glee days), after all. Loving it is divisive, certainly. Still, for this critic, when Murphy’s tendency towards smug wit clicks, it gives his shows a kind of devil-may-care energy. It goes well with the show’s moments of sly referential humor, like casting Isabella Rossellini, an immoral beauty in Death Becomes Her in 1992, as one of the show’s strongest voices against the drug.

Unfortunately, that cynicism can often tip over into straight-up ugliness. For instance, the series’ treatment of Jaquel Spivey feels so mean-spirited that it undermines so much of the grand guignol thrills. The Beauty shows insight and empathy toward many of its characters. The show’s treatment of Emma Halleen, a pretty teen too battered by beauty standards to recognize anything special about herself, for instance, is smart and accurate. That makes the show’s reduction of Spivey to an overweight, miserable masturbator stuck at his mom’s house all the more galling. To steal/paraphrase a joke from the Flop House podcast, why does Hollywood insist masturbation and misery go hand in hand (pun only mildly intended)? The show eventually takes the character places, but that bad taste lingers for episodes after.

The Beauty also falls flat when it tries to draw parallels between its wonder drug and more conventional beauty “interventions” like Ozempic, veneers, or breast implants. There’s something to being worried about how GLP-1’s may be the bridesmaid of another dangerous “thin is in” era in show business. Or that easy plastic surgeries and injections are eliminating the “character” in the faces of many actors, singers, and models. But when the show flirts with those themes, it is either excessively facile or it totally undermines itself, as with the Spivey example above. If it isn’t willing to put effort into the social commentary, the show is better off just alighting it and enjoying its mix of body horror, corporate intrigue, law enforcement shenanigans, and soapy softcore interludes.

Perhaps the best metaphor for the show as a whole is the score by Mac Quayle. Often, it is the right level of overblown and faux intense. A proper mix of skill and musical cheese for this kind of show. At other times, it is so insistent that it robs moments of the suspense they need to flourish. And so it is with The Beauty. Sometimes it gets all its elements just right and gives audiences a silly blast of gross-out thrills. And others, it fails to recognize how undercooked or overly cruel its ideas are. It is, indeed, Murphy’s best in some time. But unlike the infected here, it never manages even skin-deep perfection.

The Beauty strikes a pose on FX and Hulu starting January 21.

The Beauty Trailer: