New TV show based on an Image comic reeks of political themes, and has a most unfortunate casting choice

Time's giving a description of a new TV show, The Beauty, starring Ryan Murphy, which is based on a fantasy comic from Image, although there appears to be a cast member here who's got some very bad political positions. First:

If you had the chance to be beautiful, would you take it? We’re not talking about mere attractiveness, but a near-immediate physical metamorphosis into a perfect human specimen. Sounds tempting, but of course there’s a catch. That’s the premise of Ryan Murphy’s new FX show, The Beauty, co-created and co-written by Matt Hodgson. In the show, The Beauty is an STI that transforms a person into someone physically perfect, but with deadly consequences. Except nobody who has The Beauty knows that.

It’s almost impossible not to draw comparisons to The Substance, the 2024 horror movie that became a breakaway box-office smash and multi-Oscar nominee. It also spawned countless reactions (positive and negative) about its depictions of what a woman (played by Demi Moore) will do in the pursuit of a younger, more beautiful version of herself. The Beauty gleefully leans into these comparisons with Coralie Fargeat’s film, even casting Demi Moore’s ex-husband, Ashton Kutcher, in a key role.

But The Beauty is not a rip-off of The Substance. It’s actually based on a comic book of the same name by Image Comics, which ran from 2015-2021. Here’s what to know about the source material for the new series, which has drawn solid reviews since its three-episode premiere.

What happens in “The Beauty” comics?

At the start of the comics, created by Jeremy Haun and Jason A. Hurley, two years have elapsed since The Beauty took over the world. It’s a rampant and sought after sexually transmitted disease, capable of transforming those infected with it into someone conventionally, well, beautiful. As the comic describes, changes to people with The Beauty include “fat melted away, thinning hair returned, skin blemishes faded, and their facial features slimmed.” Unlike other diseases, people covet The Beauty. It’s believed that half the world has the disease, including around 200 million Americans.

The Beauty has caused enormous division between those who have it and those who don’t. For some, it’s the ultimate status symbol; for others, a complete and utter betrayal of humankind. Activist groups that are both pro- and anti-Beauty have emerged, with hate crimes, homicides, and bombings on the rise as divisions deepen.

I don't know how to say this, but there's something eerily political about this, and atop that, it sounds like the kind of story premise that villifies and gives beauty itself a bad name. Seeing as this comic first premiered at least a decade ago, when political correctness became tragically more common, it does sound like quite a product of its time. And look who one of the cast members is:

While the comics start with the disease in full swing and known worldwide, The Beauty is very much under wraps at the beginning of the show. The first episode opens with a model (Bella Hadid) wreaking havoc on the streets of Paris before she shockingly combusts. Two FBI agents, Cooper Madsen (Evan Peters) and Jordan Bennett (Rebecca Hall), are sent to investigate and uncover a string of models dying in a similar fashion across Europe.

They cast Hadid, an Islamist who identifies as a "palestinian", and who, much like her sister Gigi, is hostile to Israel? Seriously, it's hard to get around this kind of casting choice, which was surely no accident, and also note how her character causes a ruckus in France, a country that's been turned into a horror story over past decades by Islam. Having somebody as awful as Hadid in this is another embarrassment. And that's not all:

They discover that before these models died, they underwent extraordinary physical changes, and none of them are recognizable compared to photos taken a few years prior. That’s because they have The Beauty, a disease transmitted through sex, as in the comics, that turns you into a new, incredibly attractive person.

The first episode largely focuses on the male perspective through the eyes of the angry, lonely, and depressed Jeremy (Jaquel Spivey). An incel, Jeremy is desperate for change and sick of feeling that he’s repulsive to women. On an online message board, he finds out about a plastic surgeon. But that surgery goes poorly, and he’s still unable to attract women. A furious Jeremy shoots up the surgeon’s office. But before he kills the surgeon, the latter offers Jeremy a miracle solution. The surgeon brings Jeremy a woman, who carries The Beauty, who has sex with Jeremy, turning him into a whole new man (literally, as he’s played by Jeremy Pope post-transformation).

What is this? They're even using a nasty, divisive slur of the past decade that was applied to men who allegedly denigrate women because they're not having luck in winning them over. And to think they even go so far as to make the character here commit a violent shooting over initial failure, but of course, nobody seems to care about school shootings that became more common since Columbine, or even Islamic terrorism. It's clear the writers/artists were resorting to some cheap premises when they concocted this tale for Image, and that doesn't reflect well on the practices of the comics industry any more than any other entertainment medium.

If this is what comicdom and Hollywood are continuing to churn out, then they're not improving, and all they're doing is delivering little more than a stealth message that physical beauty is something bad. Stories depicting sex negatively are nothing new in entertainment, but the way it continues now is extremely disturbing at this point. I think this is something worth avoiding, and it's no surprise most showbiz critics could gush over such a sleazy production. "The Beauty" sounds a lot more like unnecessary ugliness.