While The Beauty’s trailer has been viewed almost 200 million times, the FX horror series still has a lot of major obstacles to overcome for the show to succeed. Ryan Murphy undeniably knows how to drum up controversy, but the legendary producer’s projects don’t always have the quality necessary to back up their shock value.
In 2025 alone, Murphy’s All’s Fair was dubbed one of the worst TV shows ever made when the campy legal drama was released, and season 3 of his Netflix true crime drama Monster: The Ed Gein Story was met with the franchise’s worst reviews yet. Despite these critical woes, both shows were still streaming successes.
Now, Murphy’s upcoming horror series The Beauty has already proven to be another controversy magnet with a starry cast, and the success of its first trailer proves the show won’t need to rely on good reviews to get publicity. The series centers on the titular sexually transmitted treatment, which makes victims physically beautiful but causes terrifying, homicidal side effects.
The Beauty’s cast includes Ashton Kutcher, Isabella Rossellini, Rebecca Hall, Anthony Ramos, Evan Peters, Ari Graynor, and Bella Hadid, meaning the show has no shortage of star power. This might explain how The Beauty’s trailer racked up a record-breaking 190 million views across social media platforms in the first week of its release.
Between January 5-13, The Beauty’s trailer earned 37 million views on YouTube alone, swiftly becoming the most-viewed promo for an FX project in the network’s history. However, this wasn’t an unequivocally good thing for the reception of the series. Although The Beauty’s trailer got plenty of views, it also garnered plenty of critical comments.
While the old adage claims that all publicity is good publicity, Murphy’s upcoming show may have given the lie to that particular show business maxim. A great many of the trailer’s comments accuse The Beauty of lifting its premise from 2024’s The Substance, another cartoonish-ly garish satirical horror-comedy about the anti-aging industry and the commodification of beauty.
The Beauty’s Source Material Makes The Substance Comparisons Unfair
To be fair to Murphy’s project, comparisons to The Substance are not the fairest of the many criticisms that could be leveled at the upcoming show. The Beauty is based on a comic book of the same name by Jeremy Haun and Jason A Hurley that was published back in 2016, so its premise isn’t lifted from The Substance as some trailer commentators assumed.
However, just because the show is based on an existing property doesn’t mean that it would be impossible for The Beauty to borrow stylistic choices and plot elements from the 2024 horror hit. Already, the biggest struggle for the show is The Beauty’s attempts to differentiate itself from The Substance, since comparisons between them are rife all over social media.
Not only do the two projects tell similar stories, but they also share an over-the-top comedic tone and a flashy visual style that makes them seem even more similar. Since Murphy’s American Horror Story franchise has historically been accused of cashing in on popular genre trends, it is not shocking that viewers consider The Beauty too similar to an earlier movie.
That said, the show’s creators are unlikely to lose any sleep over the comparison. After all, The Beauty still has one of the most-viewed TV trailers of all time, so the show’s ratings are seemingly guaranteed to be stronger than the last few outings from the struggling American Horror Story franchise. Those seasons struggled to make a mark with audiences despite stunt casting.
The Beauty’s Trailer Success Highlights A TV Trend
Furthermore, horror television is having a moment right now, and The Beauty’s success on social media proves that Murphy’s show could take advantage of this trend. From It: Welcome to Derry to Stranger Things season 5 to Alien: Earth, almost every major streaming service has at least one flagship show that is a horror series.
Murphy’s American Horror Story predates all of these, as the FX staple has been telling scary stories on the small screen since way back in 2011. Even the short-lived comedic slasher series Scream Queens proves that Murphy’s investment in the horror genre comes from a place of genuine appreciation, meaning The Beauty may still prove a surprise critical success upon its arrival.
Ultimately, it was messy plotting, unclear character motivations, and a preponderance of shock value that derailed both Monster: The Ed Gein Story and Delicate, the most recent season of American Horror Story. There’s no denying Murphy knows his way around a horror story, as classic American Horror Story outings like Murder House and Cult prove.
The producer had an awful 2025, his American Horror Story franchise has been struggling for years, and The Beauty’s offbeat horror comedy live-action cartoon tone could soon still prove anathema to critics. However, the show deserves props for furthering the mainstream promotion of horror TV, and The Beauty may still surprise critics by offering a truly thoughtful, scary, satirical story.
