This article contains spoilers for various Ryan Murphy shows, including FX and Hulu’s new series, The Beauty.
Can anyone stop Ryan Murphy? Whatever you think qualitatively of the mega-producer’s creations, there was a time that he was at least reliably churning out hit after hit – controversial series that captured the zeitgeist like Nip/Tuck, Glee, and American Horror Story. But as his output has increased over time, the accompanying reaction has varied, both in terms of viewers as well as critical – and more importantly, fan – response. Basically, the hitmaker has started turning in more misses than hits, and given the goopy mess of FX and Hulu’s new comic book adaptation, The Beauty, it’s time for Murphy to take a step back, assess what he’s doing, and figure out once again how to make, if not good TV, at least watchable TV.
First, a word about Ryan Murphy shows…because they’re not all created equal. There was a time when Murphy was the man behind everything – creator, producer, writer, and director. He may have worked with partners, but his voice came through clear and true, starting with the 1999-2001 WB critical fave but short-lived Popular, to 2003-2010’s controversy-drawing FX plastic surgery drama, Nip/Tuck, co-starring the late, great Julian McMahon.
But it really wasn’t until 2009 that Murphy created what would elevate him to the lofty heights of TV greats like Shonda Rhimes, Norman Lear, and others. Fox’s Glee was a massive, culture-shifting hit that defined a generation of young TV viewers, created massive stars, and launched a world tour. Love it or hate it – it was impossible to avoid Glee. Murphy did it again in 2011 with American Horror Story, which was a bunch of insane nonsense that nevertheless hit like a lightning bolt with its dark turns for faves like Connie Britton and Dylan McDermott, an unhinged performance by Jessica Lange, and most importantly for the Glee crowd, relatively fresh-faced young performers to become obsessed with in Evan Peters and Taissa Farmiga.
That’s all Early Murphy™; a little over a decade into his storied career, things started to change. There were misses like the 2012 sitcom, The New Normal (which was canceled after one season), and Fox’s Scream Queens in 2015, although the horror comedy has seen a reappraisal in recent years thanks to performances by Glen Powell and Ariana Grande. And there were shows that worked, but could arguably be more attributed to Murphy’s collaborators than the man himself: American Crime Story, Feud, and Pose all counted Ryan Murphy as part of the team, but other voices came through, with Murphy clearly not the loudest one in the room.
At the same time, Murphy created the long-running Fox hit, 9-1-1, which launched in 2018 and later spun off into another hit, 9-1-1: Lone Star (2020-2025). From the outside, both shows felt Murphy’s influence, but seemed like the sort of procedurals that run themselves…even if the emergency crews sometimes deal with getting stuck in space or bee tornadoes, two Murphy touches if there ever were ones.
The biggest shift, and in some aspects the biggest mistake in Murphy’s career, was his 2018 deal with Netflix. It wasn’t perhaps a monetary mistake – Murphy netted $300 million from the deal – but going from weekly programming to the binge model not only changed the rhythm of his shows, but also stretched him too thin. To wit: In 2018 when the deal kicked off, Murphy had American Horror Story, American Crime Story, Feud, 9-1-1, and Pose, and was prepping more down the road. In the first decade of his career, he ran three shows that only briefly overlapped, but in the past decade, running up to this year’s The Beauty? 21 TV series, with at least two more on the way. Even for a super-producer like Murphy, one cannot sustain a consistent level of quality at that pace, particularly when one is pulling double, triple, and sometimes even quadruple duty on a series. That’s not even taking into account the movies, reality shows, and many public appearances Murphy has been involved in. There are high performers, and then there are people who are constantly on the brink of burnout; Murphy’s more recent output indicates the latter.
While not by any stretch of the imagination a complete picture of a career, take a look at the Rotten Tomatoes scores for Murphy’s shows. Other than The New Normal, in that pre-2018 period, all Ryan Murphy shows were in the “Fresh” portion, with Glee hitting a low of 70% and Pose a high of 98%. After 2018? The Politician came in rotten with 51%, Hollywood also rotten at 58%, with Ratched, Halston, and American Horror Story barely scraping by with 62-67% fresh. We won’t list every show Murphy has done, but at least on the inexact scale of Rotten Tomatoes, Murphy went from a pretty good hit ratio in his first decade to nearly 50/50 fresh versus rotten post-2018. On Rotten Tomatoes’ scale? That’s rotten. (The lone exception is Hulu’s Mid-Century Modern, which Murphy produced but did not create, write, or direct).
On Metacritic, which has a more focused critic base than Rotten Tomatoes’ wide berth and breaks things down more granularly, Murphy has a lifetime average career score of 62 out of 100. Earlier Murphy is almost exclusively in the green (aka positive), but since 2018, he’s mixed to negative, leading up to last year’s critical failure – the Kim Kardashian-starring Hulu series, All’s Fair.
There are high performers, and then there are people who are constantly on the brink of burnout; Murphy’s more recent output indicates the latter.
That’s all well and good, but what about viewers? There, Murphy has been more successful. On Nielsen’s independent rankings of streaming numbers, Netflix’s The Watcher hit number one, as did the One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest prequel, Ratched, as well as both iterations of the controversial serial killer series, Monster, focusing on Jeffrey Dahmer and the Menendez Brothers. All’s Fair, meanwhile, matched its critical drubbing by not hitting the Nielsen Top 10, although it did hit in the Top 15 on Luminate’s rankings, and was picked up for a second season.
The fact of the matter is that Murphy does still know how to produce hits and cause debates – check out the furious arguments over Monster – but where fans and critics were often aligned on his past projects, more recent reactions have been all over the place, particularly when it comes to the abysmal response to All’s Fair. Murphy’s flair for pulp fun seems to have turned into a parade of “hey, I know that guy” as he combs through his rolodex for friends to hang out with. That has worked less and less on American Horror Story, with later seasons barely hitting the way earlier ones did, and the American Horror Stories anthology spin-off coming and going with hardly any discussion.
All of that brings us to The Beauty, a comic book adaptation in 11 episodes starring (once again) Evan Peters, Rebecca Hall, Anthony Ramos, Ashton Kutcher, and Jeremy Pope. While as of this writing we don’t know about the critical response or the viewership levels, it has all the hallmarks of a Murphy show: There’s an all-star cast (nearly every speaking role is a Murphy regular and/or supermodel); a pulpy premise (an STD causes people to grossly transform into their most beautiful selves and sometimes explode into bloody chunks); and the unerring support of his frequent collaborators, FX.
But without getting too far into spoilers for the season – it premieres with three episodes, then has a staggered release until a two-episode finale on March 4 – the show is barely coherent as a television series. The initial premise is quickly and rudely shoved to the side as the series gets distracted by other sci-fi concepts. Characters appear and disappear at random; some sections are full-on music videos; a flashback begins halfway through an episode, and then continues into the next episode. Coming from a man (that would be Murphy) who made his bones in weekly, episodic television, it’s wild to look back on (for example) Glee, one of the most unhinged shows ever created, as a bastion of good TV format versus whatever The Beauty is delivering on a weekly(ish) basis.
There’s every chance that The Beauty will be another Murphy success, or at least deliver on what FX and Hulu are looking for. It’s hard to deny that Bella Hadid exploding on the Paris police or Meghan Trainor getting thrown out a skyscraper window are the sort of scenes crafted for meme-able, TikTok-clippable moments, but – nothing against TikTok – that’s not a TV show. There is no arc to the series on an episodic basis, and definitely not to the season. The same can be said for All’s Fair or any number of recent seasons of American Horror Story that feel like Murphy is a dog chasing cars, looking to grab whatever shiny bumper catches his fancy next.
Maybe there isn’t that impetus – that young man’s drive to prove himself – that the now 60-year-old Murphy once had at the beginning of his career. At the New York Comic Con panel for The Beauty, Murphy opined pretty extensively about the good food they ate and nice boats they rode on while filming in Venice. If he’s in his Adam Sandler go-on-vacation-with-my-friends phase, and if his goal is to travel the world and have a nice time, well, good for him. There also may not be the monetary or viewership impetus, given everyone from Netflix to Disney keeps tossing money his way while the algorithm gets people watching. Perhaps he’s merely run out of things to say about the underdogs of Glee or the drag ball culture of Pose.
But for those of us who have been watching Murphy’s shows since the beginning of his career, they’ve gone from someone saying, “hey, you wanna see a car crash?” and then purposefully ramming their car into the wall, to him seemingly sitting in the backseat and letting the Cybertruck take him where it wants to go, admiring the view along the way. That’s not sustainable, and it’s not the way to have a career that stands the test of time. Murphy’s oeuvre has always been characterized by wild swings and by too much stuff, but at least with the structure of a 42-minute drama punctuated by commercials, some of those baser instincts were reined in by default. The streaming era has eroded that, leading to some awful television that just does not work.
Will Murphy heed this advice, take a year or two off, and come back with something truly great? Probably not, but one can hope. And that’s what we missed from Glee.
