The Beauty could be described as the most Ryan Murphy-esque opening sequence ever. Here's a supermodel striding down the runway, looking radiant. Yet, there's a hint of something off-kilter beneath the surface. It's a convincing model performance, considering it's Bella Hadid—a casting coup akin to Kim Kardashian leading a legal drama. But Bella isn't the lead here. In the opening minutes of Episode 1, "Beautiful Pilot," she goes ballistic, attacking people in the crowd, guzzling their water, fleeing into the streets, stealing a motorcycle, racing through Paris, getting T-boned by a car and flying through the air, breaking several bones on landing. She staggers into a cafe, batters more people, shrugs off a gunshot, and then literally explodes. See what I mean? Very Ryan Murphy—and it only gets more Ryan Murphy from there, if that’s possible.
Bella Hadid's explosive outburst, dubbed by the press as "Catwalk Carnage," is merely the latest in a seemingly endless string of similarly combustible incidents. On the case are FBI agents Cooper Madsen and Jordan Bennett, who are in a transactional sexual relationship but are chalk and cheese in terms of their personal approaches to their physical appearances. Jordan didn’t like her boobs and got new ones; on a date, Cooper’s greyish teeth were criticized, but he didn’t feel the need to do anything about it. “Beauty is pain,” Jordan says at one point, which seems like a capsule summary of the show itself and encapsulates the idea that underpins everything: How far are you willing to go to be beautiful?
If you’re someone like Jeremy, an overweight and socially incompetent incel living in his mother’s house and lost in the maelstrom of webcam sites and extremist forums, you’ll go pretty far. Jeremy is obsessed with transforming himself to become more desirable to the women he covets; he wants to become the quintessential contemporary man. You can kind of imagine what he means by that, but the clues fall into place throughout the premiere if you're unsure. Through the forum, he’s directed to an elite aesthetic clinic presided over by a man (I think?) who has undergone so much facial surgery he looks like he’s wearing a Bo’ Selecta! mask, and he undergoes some procedures that turn his face into a Bo’ Selecta! mask, which he thinks makes him extremely beautiful.
To test this theory, Jeremy ventures out to a bar, where he's approached by three attractive young women. They dance and frolic, and for the first time ever, he feels suddenly desirable. However, when he rushes to the bathroom to throw up, they seize the first opportunity to leave and leave Jeremy with their drinks tab. To say he doesn't take the rejection well would be an understatement - he returns to the clinic with a gun and starts shooting indiscriminately. The surgeon only survives the massacre by promising a more radical solution. He takes Jeremy to the penthouse suite of a swanky hotel, instructs him to strip and lie on the bed, and await the arrival of a woman named Claire (Chanel Stewart, aka Miss Universe Australia). She eventually arrives and climbs astride him, taking the virginity he's been trying to shed for so long. But this seemingly altruistic gesture is anything but. The next morning, Jeremy wakes up sweating and gasping for water, just like Ruby in the opening scene. In a thrilling body-horror sequence, his body starts to contort and change in real-time. His teeth fall out. He pulls his innards from his throat. His face sloughs off. But when he emerges from a gooey chrysalis, he's a new man - the handsome, in-shape Chad he always dreamed of being.
Thanks to the rest of The Beauty Episode 1, we know this is bad news. Jordan and Cooper start investigating the death of Ruby and similar incidents in Berlin and London that begin to form an intriguing pattern. None of the dead models were originally beautiful stunners. Like Jeremy, they were once typically "unattractive" people. They became their own idealized versions of themselves. Jordan and Cooper assume it was through surgery, but thanks to what happened to Jeremy, we now know better. They all seem to have contracted the same STD that Claire passed on, which made them beautiful but at a cost. Eventually, they spontaneously combusted. Beauty is pain, as Jordan said. I don't think anyone quite anticipated this much pain. Nevertheless, there has been another related case in Venice, so that's where Jordan and Cooper are heading next. See you in Episode 2.
