The Creative Contempt of Ryan Murphy, The Showrunner Who Hates His Audience

In The Beauty, a sexually transmitted disease that offers picture-perfect attractiveness as a side-effect has become a hot commodity. People, willingly or otherwise, find themselves infected with a virus that painfully transforms them into a younger, hotter, and more commercially viable version of themselves. The problem? It’ll kill you, painfully and hilariously so. it’s The Substance, but meaner and less interesting.

Devotees of Ryan Murphy seem to be on board with The Beauty, and even critics are warmer on it than they were for most of his 2025 work, which included the repugnant Ed Gein season of Monster and the almost avant-garde trainwreck of inanity and vanity that was All’s Fair. But even fans of this new satire (?) seem hung up on the usual cycle of Murphy-isms that plague his output: the dialogue is stilted, the subtext is non-existent, talented actors are wasted in nothing roles and not directed away from needless ham, the concept quickly runs out of steam, and it all just seems kind of cruel for no dang reason. A lot of the critiques of The Beauty could be applied verbatim to any number of Murphy shows, and the chances are we could copy-paste them into reviews of future programming. Murphy is in a creative nadir.

And yet he keeps audiences hooked. All’s Fair was the worst reviewed show of 2025 by a country mile and it got renewed for a second season. Monster left us disgusted by its fetishisation of a murderer but that fourth season was quickly greenlit. The Beauty has gone viral several times over thanks to ludicrous acting and line deliveries that play like a joke on the audience, and people love it. For a man with such evident contempt for his own audience, it’s fascinating how Murphy continues to attract such fidelity. He is truly unstoppable, and as his power has grown, his creativity has dwindled into pure smarm.

It didn’t used to be like this, although the signs were always there. Murphy always prized salaciousness and glossy exploitation, long before he became the head of a TV empire. Nip/Tuck was a primetime soap with all the trappings that entailed, and Glee fell off the rails in record time thanks to Murphy’s flighty attention span and commitment to iTunes sales over thematic consistency. The first two seasons of American Crime Story are sharply told dissections of true crime and its human impact, told with resonance that avoided much of the salaciousness Murphy is infamous for. When it did delve into such territory, it was usually with an empathetic eye, focused on victims and calling out the media and political culture that so thoroughly shamed them.

Still, when Murphy-verse shows go off the rails, nobody is ever surprised. The plot going haywire and concluding in a disappointing manner is as expected a part of every season of American Horror Story as Sarah Paulson’s presence. It’s obvious when Murphy gets bored of his own ideas and tries to keep himself amused, even if it’s to the detriment of the narrative and his forever hard-working actors. As he’s grown more powerful, he has fewer people to answer to, and his most leering and bad-taste qualities have grown more unbearable. All three seasons of Monster felt queasy in their fetishistic gaze towards real-life murderers. It often felt like he and his team were enjoying the grotesque material and chance to play around with actual victims’ lives. With the most recent season, focused on Ed Gein, the sexualising of a necrophile proved to be a new nadir for Murphy’s contemptible worldview.

It must be said that there are divides in the Murphy world. He puts his name to a lot of shows to get them made but remains hands-off so that one of his proteges can shine. Pose got to be its own beautiful thing without too much of his micromanaging. The second season of Feud retained its sly light touch in depicting a low-stakes rich person scandal with the appropriate amount of investment and style. There’s also the Murphy who makes network programming, which is usually fizzy and increasingly over-the-top procedurals where anything goes. These feel like throwbacks to the primetime soaps of the ’80s, and everyone knows they’re nonsense. They’re a sharp contrast to his cable and streaming fare, which is where he blends that nihilistic faux-camp with an aching reach for prestige. That makes stuff like Monster all the harder to stomach: it’s cruelty and inanity disguised as high art, begging for Emmys while telling its own audience they’re dumb for being there.

Ryan Murphy makes shows for people who love to use the phrase, ‘it’s not that deep.’ It’s content for accounts that churn out subtitled screenshots of random scenes devoid of wit or style but with captions that read, ‘ohmigod, serving c**t.’ As entertainment moves further towards a brain-switched-off agenda, encouraging creators and viewers alike to only give some of your attention to the screen while you swipe on your phone, Murphy is primed to be the leader of the pack. He’s long harnessed the power of rage-baiting and woven it into the fabric of his brand, a keen-eyed mixture of high-camp, high-concept, and low expectations. Everything in his world is fair game, regardless of proportion, empathy, or plain good taste. Indeed, taste must be bad in the Murphy-verse, otherwise the foundations will crumble.

The Beauty seems to have earned stronger reviews than expected, but I don’t think it’s any better than All’s Fair. It’s more Murphy-esque, which is not a good thing because it means every character is either a blank slate or a reprehensible caricature. There’s nothing to latch onto in this ugly world (the cinematography is especially lacking), a place where everyone is vain and is punished for it as though they’ve committed war crimes. The Substance was set in a parodic version of the real world too but it still imbued its protagonist with pathos and understood it wasn’t her fault she was trapped in a cycle of self-loathing. The Beauty wants you to scoff at these people but still gawk at their hot bodies. For a show that desperately doesn’t want you to take it seriously, it still sees itself as weighed down by importance. It’s ugly inside and out, and it’s not even fun about it. At least Yorgos Lanthimos’s misanthropy has heft.

I don’t have high hopes for Murphy’s future output. American Love Story, which will focus on the relationship between John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette, seems like a nuanced story that won’t benefit from his sledgehammer approach. He’s already expressed total disdain for the material and the real-life people’s loved ones, trying to refute the criticisms of Kennedy’s nephew, John Schlossberg, by claiming he never knew his uncle before his death. Even if that weren’t a lie, it’d still be a supremely cruel thing to say, but Murphy needs cruelty to fuel his worldview, one where everyone is his marionette puppet and he can pull the wings off as many flies as he wants. He’ll keep getting chance after chance to do it too. How ugly.