"A biotech C.E.O. named Byron Forst (Ashton Kutcher) packages the pathogen as The Beauty, which he calls an "injectable Instagram filter"-though it doesn't enhance one's features so much as transform them entirely, rendering the infected unrecognizable to their friends and family. Another side effect: these supermodel selves can only survive for about two years, before a literal hotness causes them to spontaneously combust."
"Murphy, with his co-creator Matt Hodgson, has retooled the premise for the Ozempic age, cannily distilling fresh societal anxieties around GLP-1 drugs. Among other concerns, the show plays with the notion that these treatments constitute a sort of shortcut: as the tagline has it, "One shot makes you hot." The timeliness lends the first few episodes an unusual energy. Ozempic and its chief competitor, Mounjaro, are name-checked in multiple episodes; so are incels and Chads."
A virus marketed as The Beauty turns hosts into flawless physical specimens overnight, producing exaggerated male musculature and youthful, thin women with enhanced facial features. Byron Forst, a biotech C.E.O., packages the pathogen as an "injectable Instagram filter," a transformation that renders infected people unrecognizable to friends and family. The transformed bodies survive only about two years before combusting from their literal hotness. The series adapts a 2016 graphic novel into an F.B.I.-centered thriller about investigators probing model deaths in Paris and Venice and reframes the premise for the Ozempic era, engaging anxieties around GLP-1 drugs and appearance optimization.
Read at The New Yorker
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