“I think everything that we do, from the minute we hit puberty to the second we die, is about sex. We go to the gym, we work on our bodies, we cut our hair, we fix our teeth, our tits, torturing ourselves for some promotion — and everything that we do is about our universal, unquenchable thirst to all be considered attractive enough to get laid.” —Agent Cooper Madsen
Put a pin in that speech. We’re gonna come back to it.
This episode of The Beauty debuts as part two of a three-part series premiere, and as such you can be forgiven if you find it a little slight. All that happens is that Agents Cooper Madsen and Jordan Bennett arrive in Venice, investigate the Hannibal-esque crime scene where a model was ritualistically murdered and staged. They wear space-age black hazmat suits and discover the Egyptian hieroglyph for “beauty” scrawled on the wall in blood.
Afterwards, the two have a frank and direct discussion about their relationship (the one quoted above), and then split up for the evening before being recalled to New York for a new case — apparently a Vogue editor spontaneously combusted in the Conde Nast cafeteria — to be picked up next episode.
Walking alone in the streets of Venice, Coop narrowly escapes being killed by two black-suited assailants whom he defeats in a prolonged running street battle. Jordan, meanwhile, has a one-night stand with an Italian hunk (Alvise Rego) who turns out to be a carrier of the bimbofication rage virus or whatever you’d call it.
She wakes up the next morning boiling hot, convulses all over the room, and eventually emerges from her cocoon a younger, more curvaceous woman (Jessica Alexander). I’m not going to say “more beautiful,” because this is Rebecca Hall we’re talking about here, but she now better resembles the version of beautiful you’ll find on catwalks and TikTok.
Meanwhile, in Rome — every single virus-related incident we’ve seen or heard about so far takes place in an important high-fashion city — a chatty but clearly experienced assassin (Anthony Ramos) takes out the man (Joey Pollari) who leaked the virus in the first place. It was stolen from a corporation run by a dashing figure (Ashton Kutcher) who’s mad that his most exclusive product has been loosed on the hoi polloi.
When the assassin wonders aloud why people aren’t happy with their station in life and have to do shit like stealing a deadly beauty virus, Kutcher’s character offers a maxim for the whole series: “Beautiful people don’t think the rules apply to them.”
Which brings us back to Madsen’s monologue about the importance of sex. Clearly, both men are projecting. Kutcher’s character, a beautiful person, is in the middle of custom-ordering a murder for hire — he specifically requests a painful death — while he complains about beautiful people flouting the rules of society. Coop claims everyone’s every move is explained by our sex drives because he’s found this to be true for himself. Even his occupation, globe-trotting FBI field agent, feels chosen to be alluring.
He’s obviously wrong to cite sex as a paramount concern for everyone, though. For one thing, asexuals exist. For another, plenty of people enjoy sex just fine but don’t see it as the be-all and end-all. But for other people…well, I remember selecting French as my foreign language class in seventh grade because I thought it sounded sexier. I joined the drama club because I liked acting, yeah, but also because it was the only co-ed activity at my all-boys Catholic high school. I hesitate to lay out the even more consequential decisions I’ve made with the attention of the opposite sex in mind as a grown-ass man.
So I think what Coop is saying is a perfectly valid thing to say, as far as Coop and a lot of other people go. Sex is something people strive for.
And is it really so bad, treating sex as hugely important in life? Jordan seems to think that yeah, it kind of is, though she’s embraced it anyway. She describes her own merriment-first approach to sex — one which isn’t really all that dissimilar from Coop’s — to a hedonistic escape from the inexorable decline and fall of the human race. “I mean, the world is on fire, right?” she asks rhetorically, before raising a glass with a toast: “Life, laugh, and fuck.”
Cooper teases her for being a nihilist, because there’s no nihilism in what he’s saying about sex: It’s something that makes him feel so good and so satisfied and so centered that he can be an FBI agent because of it. It offers both transcendence and grounding, the way religion is supposed to do.
And the irony is that this blunt, almost crass discussion of what Coop and Jordan like and want, about each other and in general, has almost has the opposite effect of what either of them intended. The two agents come closer to kissing each other with passion and expressing real romantic affection for each other in this moment than ever before. Even if they’ve only bared their bodies to one another before, they’re baring their souls now, and that’s enthralling.
Needless to say, casting pros like Evan Peters and Rebecca Hall in these roles helps flesh these characters out beyond the skeleton provided by the writing; they add subtleties to unsubtle writing. They’re also excellent physical performers: I’m sure a professional contortionist was used for the most dramatic moments, but Hall definitely throws herself around a palatial hotel room like Isabelle Adjani in Possession while wearing nothing but sweat-soaked underwear. Peters, meanwhile, acquits himself very well in that long chase/fight scene, which recalls the best moments from Daredevil or The Punisher in its brutal physicality and the use of the setting itself as a weapon.
It’s very early in the season, and hard to tell where things are headed. But if The Beauty has a thesis, it seems to be that we tie up a reasonable idea — sex rules — with an unreasonable one — so we must brutalize and contort ourselves into the physical shape society tells us will earn us the most sex. Why does “society” get a say in it to begin with?
You can say what you will about Ryan Murphy, and there’s certainly plenty to say. But virtually all of his work from Nip/Tuck to Monster: The Ed Gein Story — good, bad, and indifferent — has been centered on societal ideals of beauty and where they leave you in the end. Who knows where he’ll end up with this particular exploration of the subject, but I find it exciting to watch him run at it head-first.
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.