If it feels like there's been a lot of Ryan Murphy news trickling through the pop culture bloodstream of late, it's mostly just because there's been a lot of Murphy, period: The producer and writer launched four different shows over a recent 10 day span, including Netflix's Monsters, FX's Grotesquerie, American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez, and Doctor Odyssey—plus new seasons of 9-1-1 and its spin-off, while also being sure to talk lots of shit about, say, the reactions of the Menendez family to the TV show he made about them. Recently, Murphy talked up his upcoming series The Beauty, which will star Evan Peters, Anthony Ramos, and Ashton Kutcher, and is about—to put it in straightforward language—an STD that makes you hot before it kills you. (We said Murphy was industrious, not subtle.) Now the producer has revealed a bit about the show, most notably the fact that it represents a new level of scale for him, with the producer explicitly comparing it to HBO's Game Of Thrones.
Here's Murphy, talking premise, putting some previously released material in his own words:
It’s something I’ve never done before, which is a sci-fi medical show about a new virus that mutates and it’s sexually transmitted, that turns you into your absolute perfect self. And the question is, how far would you go to be beautiful? What would you sacrifice to that, and does that matter? That show was looking at, I call it the Ozempic culture. One little shot, and suddenly you’re going to look better and feel better, and all your problems are going to go away. But what are you really working on? What’s going on with you that you feel you need to do that? Sometimes it is health, sometimes it’s vanity.
More eye-catchingly, Murphy is apparently moving even further up in the world, budget-wise, with the show set to film in multiple locations across Europe. "Venice, Rome and Paris," Murphy noted. "It’s a very big budget, kind of Game Of Thrones in its scale.” Although there are so many of them that it's hard to generalize, we tend to think of Murphy shows as pretty muted affairs in the money department: The fashion budgets might be massive, but many of his series tend to feel pretty constrained in scale, largely focused on big, interesting performances from his various stars. (Including Peters and Jeremy Pope, who Murphy said he wrote this latest show specifically for.) It's not like Murphy hasn't gotten fantastical, even apocalyptic before—this is the man who co-created American Horror Story—but hearing him getting ready to get freshly ambitious is genuinely interesting (and moderately terrifying)… even if the premise of the series, based on a series of comic books, sounds a little familiar.
