A filmmaker auditioning leads for his next project has a philosophical insight. “Our ideas about heroes and gods, they only get in the way,” the eccentric Eastern European auteur Von Kovak (Zlatko Buric) lectures the actors assembled in his home for a day of offbeat dramatic exercises. “It’s too difficult to comprehend them. So, let’s get past them. Let’s find the human underneath.” This might not seem like such a profound realization for a lion of the festival circuit. But it feels downright revolutionary when you hear him say it in the new Disney+ Marvel dramedy Wonder Man. The MCU isn’t exactly known for getting past lofty ideas about heroes and gods.

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What is this guy even doing in this world, you might ask. In fact, he’s a key character in a show set not on a distant planet or in a grid of skyscrapers doomed to topple in a superpowered melee, but in a mostly realistic Los Angeles where the entertainment industry is still (and here you might have to suspend your disbelief) based. Wonder Man, whose first season will stream in full on Jan. 27, is not like other Disney+ Marvel projects. Nor is it like the other Disney+ Marvel projects that were hyped as being not like other Disney+ Marvel projects (see: Wandavision) but ultimately abandoned ambitious storytelling in favor of generic, VFX-heavy fight scenes and choppily integrated teasers for the next MCU movie. This alone might’ve made it the platform’s best Marvel show yet. But smart casting, witty writing, lively directing, and artful character development have also yielded the rare superhero riff that, as Kovak puts it, finds the human underneath.

Though its Hollywood is fleshed out with a big, delightful cast, Wonder Man is built on the skeleton of a classic two-hander. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, whose resume in this genre includes the Aquaman movies as well as HBO’s subversive Watchmen series, is our self-sabotaging would-be hero, Simon Williams, a struggling actor first seen getting fired from American Horror Story for overthinking a minor role. A cinephile obsessively devoted to his craft, he’s the kind of guy who makes notes about which books his single-scene character would be reading and expects everyone on set to care about it as much as he does. This same self-centeredness compels his girlfriend (Olivia Thirlby) to move out of their modest apartment without warning.

Drowning his woes in a Midnight Cowboy matinee, he spots a fellow thespian. Marvel fans will also recognize this character, whose sonorous British accent is audible before we see his face. It is Ben Kingsley’s Trevor Slattery, who was introduced as an ostensible villain, the Mandarin, in a series of propaganda videos claiming credit for terrorist attacks in 2013’s Iron Man 3. You can read more than any reasonable person would want to know, on the internet, about the history of this character. But for our purposes, what’s important is that Trevor never masterminded any bombings. He was a pathetic, substance-addicted actor too high to comprehend that he was the frontman for deadly acts of terrorism—a performance he provided for the low price of free drugs.

The past decade, with its rampant conspiracy theories, has clearly taken its toll on the now-sober Trevor. “Whatever theories you’ve seen on Reddit are totally false,” he grumbles when Simon introduces himself. “I had nothing to do with Pizzagate, I’m not a member of the Illuminati, and I did not have my hands replaced by baby hands.” Simon’s surprising reply: “I always dug your performance as the Mandarin.” For both men, the play, as it were, is the thing. They speak the same culturally omnivorous language, savoring Pinter but also reminiscing about Trevor’s stint opposite Joe Pantoliano in a medical soap. (Wonder Man is the kind of show where a mention of Joey Pants reliably leads to a Joey Pants guest appearance.) They’re in similar positions, too, stuck at the fringes of their art form due to their own poor choices.

In a refreshing departure from so many impenetrable Marvel series past, creators Deston Daniel Cretton and Andrew Guest expediently fill in viewers on the essential points of Trevor’s backstory. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to reveal that his and Simon’s meet-cute in the cinema is no coincidence; suffice to say that it isn’t so simple to extricate yourself from the grasp of law enforcement once you’ve been the face of a notorious terrorist organization. He isn’t the only half of this buddy comedy harboring secrets, though. In an industry that has reason to be wary of superpowered individuals, Simon’s career depends upon his ability to control his emotions.

Soon, he’s cajoling Trevor (or so he thinks) into admitting that he’s about to read for a role in a reboot of the 1980s superhero flick Wonder Man. Simon has loved the movie since he was a kid and will stop at nothing to audition for the lead. Pity his agent, Janelle, a kind but long-suffering truth teller played by the charismatic X Mayo. “You’re one of the most talented people that I know,” she tells her client. “But there’s a lot of talented people out here who are not pains in the ass.” This doesn’t stop Simon from lying his way into the casting. Trevor is, of course, waiting for him there, and their friendship develops through a series of adventures that feel authentic to the characters and setting. The Englishman tags along to a party at Simon’s childhood home, where a warm welcome from his effusive Haitian mom (Shola Adewusi from Bob Hearts Abishola) and judgmental comments from his more successful, square brother (Justified’s Demetrius Grosse) establishes the family dynamic that has made Simon so desperate to prove himself.

Wonder Man doesn’t just use Hollywood as a backdrop for a superhero story. Cretton, who broke through with the acclaimed indie film Short Term 12 before making his Marvel debut as the director and co-writer of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and Guest, a network sitcom alum who scripted some of the best episodes of Community, demonstrate a genuine affection for the setting. As wonderfully portrayed by Buric, the Wonder Man reboot’s director is every European artiste absorbed into the American studio system cut with a dose of Werner Herzog’s gloom; his mansion could be a museum of Hollywood Regency decadence. The show is equally witty about the quirks of the 21st century movie business. Simon takes Trevor to record a self-tape audition at a janky, nautical-themed storefront studio called Ahoy Tapes. In a standalone episode that makes hilarious use of Josh Gad, guest-starring as himself (and recalls Guest’s Community highlights), a nightclub doorman (Byron Bowers) finds stardom when he touches a mysterious goo and his body becomes a literal door that people can pass through.

Judging by the glut of films and series set on studio lots, screenwriters have taken the age-old advice to write what they know to heart. Wonder Man might sound redundant the year after Apple gave us Seth Rogen’s excellent The Studio, which shares its fun guest casting and we-kid-because-we-love approach to Hollywood satire. (One of Simon’s rivals for the Wonder Man role got his start as “Paul Thomas Anderson’s surfing instructor.”) Marvel also feels a bit late to the meta-superhero show concept; Watchmen and Amazon’s The Boys both debuted in 2019. HBO’s dour, short-lived MCU sendup The Franchise came and went in 2024. What makes Wonder Man fresh despite all the competition is the care with which Simon, Trevor, and their fraught relationship are rendered by Abdul-Mateen, Kingsley, and the creators. Characters this vivid and enjoyable to spend time with are hard to find in any genre, let alone superhero fare.  

That’s not to say the show escapes every Marvel (and particularly Disney-Marvel) pitfall. Most of the female characters are underwritten; I don’t see the point of hiring a talented actor like Thirlby when her presence is going to be confined to a few scenes spread out across an eight-episode season. A story adult enough to feature cursing still can’t muster the maturity to resist the old coming-of-age cliché of superpowers as an all-purpose metaphor for the innate differences that make people special. Yet this all feels very forgivable when you arrive at the season finale, and it’s an episode focused on advancing character arcs rather than having those characters shoot lasers at each other from high up in the heavens. More than any live-action Marvel show that Disney+ has produced before, Wonder Man accomplishes what Netflix did with Jessica Jones and FX did with Legion (while also creating a much lighter viewing experience). It gives people with no interest in superheroes for superheroes’ sake reason to watch—all the way to the end.

Ryan Murphy never gives us any peace. One month, the megaproducer is on Netflix, using Ed Gein as a vehicle to indict the audience that devours the kind of lurid true-crime tales that are his specialty; the next, he pops up on Hulu, pairing a half-dozen acclaimed actresses with one of the most famous women on the planet for what is nominally a lawyer show but actually just hollow girlboss pastiche. In February, he’ll celebrate Valentine’s Day with Love Story, an FX anthology series that will dramatize real-life romances, beginning—riskily—with that of JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy. But for his first contribution to the network in 2026, The Beauty, he and co-creator Matthew Hodgson have concocted a genre-hopping oddity that sounds even less likely to work. The big surprise is that, unlike so many of Murphy’s recent projects, it does.

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Premiering with two episodes on Jan. 21, the series proceeds from a premise that immediately calls to mind the darkly comic horror movie The Substance, an underdog 2024 Best Picture contender that earned Oscar nominations for both its director, Coralie Fargeat, and its star, Demi Moore. A revolutionary biotech product called The Beauty catalyzes—through a grotesque process involving a sort of flesh cocoon—radical physical transformations, turning the old, the sick, the ugly, and the merely average into young, healthy, stunning specimens of human perfection. Most creators would presumably want to downplay the resemblance between their new show (which is based on a decade-old comic by Jeremy Haun, an executive producer, and Jason A. Hurley) and one of the most prominent movies of the last few years. But brazenness has always been Murphy’s M.O. Of all the people he could have cast as The Beauty’s yassified mastermind, he chose Ashton Kutcher, a man equally famous for his career as an actor turned venture capitalist and for marrying a 42-year-old Moore when he was 27.

You’d think the Substance–Beauty, Kutcher-Moore connection would be tough to get past. (Moore, who had a role in 2024’s Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, is also part of the Murphyverse.) As it turned out, I basically forgot about that bit of casting-as-metacommentary within the first few installments of the 11-episode season. That’s one benefit of Murphy’s maximalist approach to storytelling: rarely does a single element of his shows overwhelm the rest. Yet the result is too often, especially in the past decade, as his output has exploded, exhausting—a messily assembled collage of camp, glamor, genre tropes, celebrity stunt casting, and strident sociopolitical satire. The Beauty delivers all of the above as early as its opening sequence, which sends a model played by Bella Hadid on a violent rampage through Paris. But its mix of styles, performers, tones, and ideas is organized into a tighter, more dynamic narrative than we usually get from Murphy. Instead of tiring us out with one macabre set piece after another, he switches up the mood regularly enough to keep scripts nimble and (mostly) avoid repetition.

Although the show picks up settings and storylines as it goes, the setup is fairly simple. Jordan Bennett (Rebecca Hall) and Cooper Madsen (Murphy regular Evan Peters) are FBI agents sent to Europe to investigate a string of gory supermodel deaths. (Who would give the name Cooper, first or last, to an FBI-agent character after Twin Peaks? Ryan Murphy, of course.) Partners and friends with benefits who’ve ruled out romance, they have potentially incompatible worldviews. He’s into “embracing imperfections”; she’s always chasing something better, whether it’s a ritzier hotel on assignment or breast implants. They mean more to each other than either seems to realize. In a series thick with Murphy’s signature schadenfreude, and one that casts its strongest actors in the few roles that require emotional realism, theirs is the rare bond that feels authentic.

As their investigation points to a sexually transmitted virus as the cause of victims’ journeys from schlumpy to hot to dead, we glimpse a more deliberate path to perfection. Kutcher’s character—the richest man in the world, who calls himself The Corporation—has, in defiance of all ethical, legal, and medical precepts, developed The Beauty. Though its primary purpose is to beautify, this miracle injection fundamentally alters the human body, turning back the clock on aging and illness, with profound implications on everything from gender to disability. The STI version poses a threat to The Corporation, both because it creates a black market and because patients who undergo the bootleg treatment tend to meet disgusting, public ends. So he’s got a roving hitman (Anthony Ramos’ The Assassin) on the payroll to kill them before they can spread it. The Beauty’s portrayal of The Corporation as a sociopath (though it’s The Assassin who loves Christopher Cross the way American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman loved Huey Lewis) with conspicuous parallels to Elon Musk is Murphy at his broadest. He says things like: “Billionaires, we don’t need friends. We have staff.” In its bluster and smarm, it’s the ideal role for Kutcher.

If The Corporation were its protagonist, like the many one-dimensional monsters around whom Murphy has built many hit TV franchises, The Beauty might be pretty hard to take. Instead, taking structural cues from the comic-book medium, it makes neither Kutcher’s character nor the FBI lovers constant presences. More than a cat-and-mouse game between him and them, the series uses that procedural framework to imagine, in psychologically astute and electrifyingly strange ways, an entire world altered by The Beauty. There’s an unexpectedly moving vignette about a trans scientist and her supportive lab partner; a pocket family melodrama in which the parents of a profoundly ill girl are faced with an unthinkable dilemma; and a mini teen soap that applies all the overused conventions of the afterschool special to this outlandish scenario. 

The Beauty is sometimes an action thriller—there are a few cool fight sequences—sometimes a sci-fi thought experiment, sometimes a body horror frightfest, sometimes a screwball romance, sometimes a Succession-on-steroids wealth satire. It’s a lark, except for when it’s a gut punch. It’s silly, except for when it’s serious. A gruesome incident that goes down amid snarky fashion-world gossip in the notorious Condé Nast cafeteria threatens to eclipse this spring’s The Devil Wears Prada sequel. There’s great scenery chomping from Isabella Rossellini, whose operatic performance as The Corporation’s trophy wife turned scathing critic reveals a perspective on beauty and its discontents accessible only to those who’ve possessed, then transcended it. Demographically, her character is the closest The Beauty comes to Moore in The Substance. But her relationship to her aging body is less predictable, her experience just one data point on a matrix of individuals shaped and warped by our society’s obsession with beauty. The problem isn’t limited to older women.

The show rarely lingers long enough in any mode to strain viewers’ patience. In lieu of the subtlety we’ve learned never to expect from Murphy, who reliably turns subtextual references to AIDS or Ozempic or the Sackler dynasty into blunt dialogue that mentions them by name, we get brisk movement from one analogy to the next and plenty of thoughtful synergy between intersecting themes. The pleasure, as with the unpredictable FX not-quite-anthologies Atlanta and Reservation Dogs, is in never knowing what each compact episode will bring.    

I wouldn’t put The Beauty in the same exalted league as those shows, not by a long shot. Murphy and Hodgson, longtime collaborators who wrote every episode together, throw too much low-carb spaghetti at the wall for all of it to stick. An early storyline features what might be the laziest incel caricature ever committed to video. Once we know which horrors to expect out of the standard Beauty onset, the lengthy transformation scenes get redundant. The dialogue sometimes lapses from bad-funny to just bad. As per usual for Hollywood, but in a choice that undermines this particular show’s themes, characters who we’re supposed to see as plain are played by extremely attractive actors. (Peters does not have “a face like a catcher’s mitt,” come on, be serious.)

The Beauty puts all of its ideas on the surface of the story, leaving little room for interpretation or ambiguity. But it’s so entertaining—and feels so timely without being a doomy drag—that it seems uncharitable to complain that it isn’t a masterpiece. The rare drama that manages to be smart without being subtle, it might make you suspect that Murphy injected himself with some professional equivalent of The Beauty and evolved, however briefly, into his ideal TV-creator self.

This article discusses, in detail, the events of Industry Season 4, Episode 2.

Industry creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay have, over the course of four seasons, upgraded their HBO drama about young finance employees in London from smart soap to somehow-even-more-entertaining laboratory for the dissection of capitalism. While Season 3 mixed beakers labeled ethics and money, with explosive results, this year’s arc puts love and sex under the profit-motive microscope. If there was ever any doubt that Down and Kay were bearish on the combination, it was dispelled within the opening scenes of the premiere, which paired characters played by two famous former child actors—Kiernan Shipka, a.k.a. Mad Men’s Sally Draper, and Stranger Things’ Charlie Heaton—for a tawdry, deceptive, disastrous hookup. Industry is where innocence goes to die, choked out in bed by various personifications of greed.

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In keeping with that central theme, the season has a cast now entirely liberated from the Pierpoint & Co. trading floor circling a payment processing startup called Tender as it cuts ties with an OnlyFans-esque platform, Siren, in a play to become a mainstream “bank killer.” But in its second episode, which aired on Sunday—and is, in my estimation, the show’s greatest hour yet—Industry takes a detour from the London rat race. From the entry-level pairing of Shipka’s Type A executive assistant character and Heaton’s sweaty finance reporter, we ascend the class ladder to the country estate of Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harington) and his bride, the disgraced heiress and Pierpoint castoff formerly known as Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela). Down and Kay, who directed as well as wrote the episode, make inspired use of this setting as a backdrop for a contemporary reimagining of Gothic tropes that makes Saltburn look lazy. (It is!)

Titled “The Commander and the Grey Lady,” it opens with Henry losing his MP race to a stiff Labour candidate, Jennifer Bevan (Amy James-Kelly). We revisit the depressive baronet, who, last season, humiliated himself with a catastrophic green-energy IPO, sometime later, as he mopes about his estate—a literal museum, where Henry growls at tour groups while playing an antique piano in his dressing gown. It’s his 40th birthday, an occasion that has made him even more miserable than usual, and Yas is throwing him a party. Also on hand to scold him out of his funk is Henry’s uncle, Lord Norton (Andrew Havill), a newspaper publisher of waning influence. He already knows just about everything we’ll discover by the end of the episode: that Henry’s father killed himself on his own 40th birthday, that young Henry witnessed the suicide. “This family hates birthdays,” Norton drawls, much later, in an understatement so grim, it’s funny.

For her part, Yas has come to see her new marriage—like her family and career—as a failure. Henry hasn’t just lost his ambition; he’s lost his libido, going so far as to advise her to sleep with other people. Stymied in her own professional endeavors but ever resourceful, Yas has invited both Bevan and Tender’s co-founder and acting CEO, Whitney Halberstram (Max Minghella), to the party in hopes of shoring up his prospects. “I’m a spectator and a caregiver,” she laments to her aunt, Cordelia (Claire Forlani), that night. The older woman’s romantic advice is as ruthless and transactional as any MBA’s negotiation strategy. “You cannot be too afraid of what you’ll lose,” she says, referring to Yas’ fear of losing the wealth, status, and protection of Henry’s family. “You’ll become too pliant, and then you will lose it. It doesn’t matter how much a man tells you he loves you. You never give them unconditional love because they will weaponize it.” In conclusion: “Get off your knees.” It’s a knockout monologue—one that sets up Yas’ Emmy-worthy tirade when she finds Henry holed up in his room doing drugs, and that draws out the Dangerous Liaisons undertones of the party’s powdered-wig-and-corset dress code. 

The 18th century theme resonates on a few levels. I couldn’t look at this manor full of sloshed nobles without thinking of the aristocrats who got guillotined in the French Revolution. Concurrent with all this decadence was the rise of Gothic literature. The ancient estate and Henry’s melancholic mien put us deep into the tropes of that genre before the plot even gets moving. Then, halfway through the episode, a ghost appears—though we can’t be certain until much later that that’s what the mysterious guest known as the Commander (Jack Farthing) is. 

He arrives at exactly the right time. A chaotic scene is unfolding as Henry rejoins the party in the dining room, a pharmacy’s worth of intoxicants coursing through his veins, and lays into Bevan. Suddenly, the Commander is at his side. “I didn’t know you were coming,” Henry greets him. The latecomer could be an old school chum; the two men appear to be the same age. What we know immediately is that he’s an enabler, hustling Henry off to the pub in pursuit of “a spit-and-sawdust tryst with a local type.” What they actually get is a baronet-walks-into-a-bar joke: there’s the priest who baptized Henry (Roy Sampson), the chambermaid Yas chewed out that morning (Esther O’Casey), and her irreverent suitor (Nye Occomore), who gleefully informs Henry of the vicious gossip circulating about his wife. In sharp contrast to the social mobility happening in the tech and finance industries, here is a place where centuries-old class snobbery is so entrenched, the commoners sneer at a noble marrying a woman who talks like a “North London git.” Henry clocks the guy, proving that his passion for Yas—and for life in general—hasn’t fully run dry. “I bet that’s the best you’ve felt in ages,” cheers the Commander.

Just about everyone in Industry has a horrible parent, is a horrible parent, or both. But the intertwined storylines of “The Commander and the Grey Lady” underscore the awfulness of both Henry’s and Yasmin’s late fathers, and suggest how that shared pain has forged a bond strong enough to survive his spoiled blueblood’s midlife crisis. There’s a real love-is-dead moment when Yas spots Cordelia, who was just rhapsodizing about the purity of her romance with a younger man, literally on her knees before a stubby, old rich guy. Yas kicks her out, but not before hearing her defend Yas’ abusive “bon vivant” dad—and, shockingly, fail to deny that anything incestuous transpired between the siblings during their “very bohemian childhood.” Is this Lady Muck finally freeing herself from the corrosive influence of the Hanani family?

Though suspicion regarding the Commander’s identity mounts throughout the second half of the episode, as the ghost interacts only with the deliriously high Henry, it isn’t confirmed until he bares his bloody, slit throat in the predawn gloam. “You’ll see me soon,” he promises his son. Henry recalls words of wisdom that the priest whispered in his ear hours earlier: “Long before morning, you will know that what you have seemed to discover was a thing that you had known all along.” Henry seems to interpret this as a reinforcement of the Commander’s prophecy—that he, too, is fated to kill himself on his 40th birthday. Before sunrise, he creeps into the garage where the antique car he associates with his father’s suicide is parked and starts to inhale fumes. But at the last second, he imagines Yasmin’s voice calling to him and escapes. Maybe the thing he’d known all along was that she was worth living for. How’s that for Gothic romance?

If there’s anything keeping “The Commander” from perfection, it’s an unnecessarily expository flashback to Henry’s childhood late in the episode, when we already know or can guess all the relevant backstory, complete with a shot in which we see the young boy replaced by Harington. But the hour is a masterpiece regardless, dense with deft dialogue, brilliant performances (especially by Abela and guest star Farthing, who was great as a dissipated upper-cruster in Rain Dogs), and perceptive character development. In the background of the love story and the ghost story, Down and Key do a lot to connect this field trip to the season-long arc. When Henry meets Whit, we see that each has what the latter needs: “Longevity in Britain is about access,” the Gatsby-like American tells the aristocrat he’s courting to be the face of Tender. “I need a partner. A native partner.” One Harper Stern (Myha’la) makes a cameo; she and Bevan, both women excelling in their careers, challenge Yas’ relegation to helpmate. (“All of this stuff is not going to get you the respect you think you deserve,” says Harper, and that you think is doing a lot of work.) Shipka’s Hayley Clay shows up, too, in an intriguing quasi-flirtation with Yas.

The final moments of the episode are like a mad lightning round. Instead of using his father’s car to kill himself, Henry pulls up to his manor, a frantic Yas runs out to meet him, and they have sex on the hood. Always hyperconscious of Industry’s place in pop culture, and particularly its connection to other shows where its cast has appeared, Down and Kay have Norton look on, from a high window, and proclaim: “Spring is coming.” (Does Yasmin lock eyes with him? Of course she does.) You bet your dragons that this is a Game of Thrones triple entendre, one that sends up Harington’s whole Jon Snow character arc. It’s a pretty broad scene, but I laughed.

But Industry wouldn’t be Industry if it ended on a purely happy note. In the car, Henry unburdens himself by telling Yas the full truth about his father’s death. Now, they realize, he’s survived the old man by a day. Psychologically, this frees him from the curse of the suicidally idle rich. He’s ready to take Whit’s job offer: “A man needs work. I think that’s why I’m here after all: to do good work.” Where does that leave Yas, whose skills at forging connections and manipulating men have afforded him this opportunity? “Maybe we should try for a child,” Henry calls out as they speed away from the home that represents his past. Yasmin says nothing, but even with sunglasses on, we can read her expression: what the hell? Her reward for enabling Henry to “do good work” will, apparently, be indefinite relegation to the domestic sphere. While we’re talking about references to other HBO prestige dramas, this coda reminded me of Tom and Shiv in the backseat of a chauffered SUV at the end of Succession, she having just defeated her brothers by handing control of the family empire to her sycophant husband, whose abilities are no match for her own. Less a ripoff than a reminder that smart women have faced similar fates since time immemorial, the twist is almost as brutal on this show as it was on that one.