• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, 5 hours ago

The ballyhooed new series “The Beauty” from producer Ryan Murphy is soft porn with extreme violence.

Clearly, this “Beauty” is in the eye of the beholder, but the TV Blog watched Episode One on Tuesday and beheld it to be not only unbeautiful, but straight-up ugly.

If this series -- premiering Wednesday on FX and Hulu -- gains a following, then it will provide even more evidence that today, people will watch anything.

Hmm, how to describe this show … Let’s take a stab at it: As I understand it (which is no mean feat), this 11-part limited series has to do with a mysterious drug or treatment that makes unattractive people beautiful so they can become supermodels.

But the problem with this drug is that after a time, its users become unstoppable killing machines right up until the moment their insides burn and their bodies explode into a million gory pieces that splatter on everything and everybody who happens to be nearby. 

If this show is trying to make the point that beauty lies within, then it has a peculiar way of doing it. 

The TV Blog believes that somewhere within “The Beauty,” it intends to make a statement about beauty and its place in human culture, or something like that.

Some have it and some don’t, says the show. And some of those who don’t are desperate to get it. And so they undergo this treatment, apparently without any knowledge of its side effects.

Unfortunately, this series is anything but philosophical or meaningful. Instead, it comes across as little more than B-movie grindhouse cinema from the 1960s and ’70s. 

I even had a thought while watching “The Beauty” that aspects of it belong in the B-movie, drive-in canon of the 1950s too -- “Invasion of the Fashion Monsters,” anyone?

Bloodthirsty model No. 1 is played by Bella Hadid (photo above) who goes on her end-of-life rampage through the streets of Paris before the opening titles. 

She is certainly bloodthirsty, but also water-thirsty. Everywhere she goes, she kills or maims a few people and then heads for any carafe of water within arm’s reach and guzzles it like a football player in a Gatorade commercial. 

Two FBI detectives stationed in Paris theorize that the water was meant to cool the fires within, but apparently it did not work. 

The two -- played by Evan Peters and Rebecca Hall -- emerge as the ostensible stars of the show, at least in Episode One.

Also starring in the series are former “That ’70s Show” star Ashton Kutcher and Isabella Rossellini, an international movie star and beauty icon who was given very poor guidance by whomever steered her toward this series. It is beneath her.

In the final analysis, “The Beauty” plays like the grotesque “American Horror Story” series that Murphy also produced, only without the words “American Horror Story” in the title.

And though the allure of such shows is beyond the ability of the TV Blog to understand, by all appearances, those “Horror” shows were popular too.

“The Beauty” premieres on Wednesday, January 21, at 9 p.m. Eastern on FX, and streaming on Hulu.