With The Beauty, Ryan Murphy aims at Glee-level viral quotability

FX’s The Beauty is set in the modern day, following FBI agents Cooper Madsen (Evan Peters) and Jordan Bennett (Rebecca Hall) as they investigate the explosive death of a fashion model. The case leads them to uncover a sexually transmitted virus that transforms ordinary people into visions of physical perfection, but with terrifying consequences.

While Murphy and Hodgson dive head-first into serious subjects like post-COVID anxieties, the Ozempic crisis, and pharmaceutical companies’ hard-ons for targeting insecure young people, don’t get it twisted. This is a deeply unserious show, right down to its sharp, snappy dialogue, which shows how even with a concept like The Beauty, Murphy and Hodgson’s comedy roots are never far behind.

[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for The Beauty episodes 1-3.]

Murphy’s craft of dialogue in his shows — and the subsequent fan reaction — is as divisive as Marmite, in my experience. His mannered, over-the-top language either lands perfectly — check out how many YouTube videos are dedicated to compiling dialogue solely from Jane Lynch as Sue Sylvester on Glee — or it comes across as cringeworthy and unrelatable. (See the entirety of 2025’s All’s Fair.) The balance of which shows feels like a fit for Murphy’s theatrical mannered dialogue and which don’t largely revolves around three things:

• The concept. Glee’s high-school setting is full of cliquey kids, and nobody is crueler than teenagers trying to advance in a high school hierarchy. It’s less clear why the employees of a law firm would talk like jaded teens.
• The characters. Sue Sylvester is a misanthropic coach who hates children. Why wouldn’t she tell her cheerleading team, “I’m going to ask you to smell your armpits. That’s the smell of failure, and it’s stinking up my office”? By contrast, Allura in All’s Fair (Kim Kardashian), a divorce lawyer who’s shaken after her husband leaves her, looks physically pained at each piece of dialogue that passes her lips.
• The release year. Language is a fluid thing that’s constantly changing under the influence of TV shows, technological advances, and/or different social circles. What worked in the 2000s feels stilted by the 2020s, like your cool dad is trying to relate to the teens.

In The Beauty, Murphy and Hodgson threaten to teeter toward the cringe-inducing dialogue of All’s Fair, but they manage to right themselves due to the variety in their ensemble cast. The leads, Cooper and Jordan, are introduced mid-sex-act. In the afterglow, one of the first things out of Jordan’s mouth is praise for Cooper’s genitals: “Your dick is my Provigil.” She’s being crude and reductive to cover up her authentic feelings for Cooper — feelings he reciprocates — but the gravity and seriousness in their interactions stops their quippier exchanges from going into full camp territory.

Image: FX

Still, they keep spouting fantastic one-liners. As they continue their investigation and realize there have been several similar deaths, all of models whose appearance radically altered over the course of two years, Jordan sardonically drawls, “Throw in enough Mounjaro to kill a horse, and anyone can have cheekbones.” That line has nestled itself in the front of my brain: It’s a little silly, but not outlandish.

The same can be said for obese, self-pitying incel Jeremy (Jacquel Spivy/Jeremy Pope). The majority of his lines in the first three episodes show him as sulky, childish, and entitled. (“Okay, fine, ‘Thank you,'” he snarls at his mother while eating her cooking. “Do I have to say it after every meal now? ‘Cause if those are the rules, I’ll just get Uber Eats, Ma.”) But he has moments of cutting hilarity. After a co-worker tells him he should try stage comedy (implying that his humor is the only thing he has going for him), Jeremy visits a plastic surgeon who gives him a cleft chin and pronounced cheekbones in an attempt to help him score girls. But the surgeon doesn’t fix his repellent personality, and Jeremy goes back to him, shouting, “You lied! Now I have to do fucking stand-up!” I’ll be quoting that forever now, whenever I feel like someone’s told me a fib.

By contrast, The Beauty’s weird and not-so-wonderful world of rich people sound like they’re in a completely different genre from the rest of the more grounded characters. Byron Forst (Ashton Kutcher) and his wife Franny (Isabella Rossellini) have a diabolical relationship, in the best way. Their resentment for each other is crystal-clear, as they exchange pleasantries like, “Every night I pray for your death,” and “Feel free to fuck yourself while you’re fucking yourself!” Unlike Cooper, Jordan, and, to a lesser extent, Jeremy, these two live in a world beyond sentimentality, empathy, or morals, and it’s reflected in their sadistic dialogue.

Photo: Philippe Antonello/FX

Murphy and Hodgson’s dialogue in The Beauty isn’t exactly Shakespearean. It doesn’t beg the audience to look inward, or express universal truths about humanity. It just encourages smirks or shocked laughter. The show’s standout lines won’t go down in history, or become something to quote to your kids someday.

But in a world where quote memes and TikTok sounds go viral daily, The Beauty‘s scripts seem designed to entice an audience that loves a good out-of-context colorful snippet. The relationship between the media and the content creator is symbiotic: If something goes viral, like Sophie Ellis Bextor’s “Murder on the Dancefloor” did thanks to TikTok, it gets a new lease of life through social media and word of mouth. The Beauty’s line “Your literal bones make you unfuckable!” is a perfect fit for this kind of sensationalism, a piece of dialogue easy to cherry-pick and use, for instance, in Chads vs. Incels memes.

The Beauty is still new, and it’s unlikely that it’ll reach the media saturation of Glee. But it would be a mistake to ignore how Murphy and Hodgson’s dialogue contributes to our understanding of the different worlds they’re exploring. Cooper and Jordan’s snarky but sensible dialogue conveys a reality that feels self-aware, even when it isn’t naturalistic or everyday. The Corporation and its vanity-obsessed toadies, however, are so campy and ridiculous that their level of audacity is galling to watch. You might laugh, be entertained by them even, but it’s impossible to root for them: These people are idiots.

They are, however, saying the zaniest things, and their quotes, deluded and self-absorbed as they are, have stuck to me as hard as the Alien-esque cocoon goo sticks to the people who go through The Beauty’s questionable-blessing beauty process. As a not-so-wise man from The Beauty once said: “Live, laugh, fuck.”

The first three episodes of The Beauty are now streaming on FX and Hulu. New episodes release on Wednesdays at 9 p.m. ET.