The Beauty opened on FX on 21 January 2026 with 512,400 viewers and a 0.16 rating among all viewers, plus 294,600 households. It never got that high again.
A week later, on 28 January, the show drew 297,900. By 4 February it was down to 183,000. It bounced to 266,000 on 18 February, then settled at 170,000 for the 4 March episode. Across that stretch, total viewership ran between 170,000 and 512,400.
Streaming told a better story. The series hit No. 1 on Hulu’s “Top 15 Today” list on 23 January and stayed on the chart through 6 March.
A big trailer, a mixed reception
The trailer, released 5 January, collected nearly 190 million views across social platforms within seven days, the most of any FX trailer to date. The first three episodes came out together on FX, Hulu and Hulu on Disney+, with the rest weekly in the US. Disney+ carried it internationally.
Reviews were mixed. The first season sits at 68% on Rotten Tomatoes from 66 reviews and 64 out of 100 on Metacritic from 33 critics. IndieWire’s Ben Travers called it a “misshapen mess” and a “feeble spin” on Coralie Fargeat’s 2024 film The Substance. RogerEbert.com said it had “so much style and very little substance.” Bloody Disgusting’s Daniel Kurland called the practical effects “genuinely remarkable” while dismissing the show as a “botched, ugly embarrassment.”
The show and the people behind it
Ryan Murphy and Matthew Hodgson created the series, which FX ordered at 11 episodes on 30 September 2024. It adapts the Image Comics title by Jeremy Haun and Jason A. Hurley, about two detectives chasing a sexually transmitted condition that makes people beautiful and then kills them.
On screen, Evan Peters plays FBI agent Cooper Madsen and Rebecca Hall plays his partner Jordan Bennett. Ashton Kutcher is tech billionaire Byron Forst, known as the Corporation, and Anthony Ramos plays his enforcer, the Assassin. Jeremy Pope, Isabella Rossellini, Bella Hadid and Ben Platt are also in the cast. Mac Quayle wrote the score.
Murphy has described the story as a comment on “Ozempic culture.” Filming began in New York City on 2 December 2024.
In July 2026, it was reported that the entire cast had been released from their contracts to pursue other projects. The future of the series is unclear.
