New FX series. The first three episodes came out yesterday. It will now be a weekly series.
Ostensibly, the genre is body horror, but the show also has serious points to make about society’s obsession with beauty, and the greed of those who profit from that obsession. In other words, the premise is more or less parallel to The Substance.
A drug company develops a sort of super-Ozempic, in the form of a virus that not only makes users thin, but also strong, beautiful, and immune to aging. And it works almost instantly! Needless to say, the profit potential of such a treatment is immense, but there’s a bootleg variation going around and Evil Drug Corporation has to get the bootlegs out of circulation to protect their profit. In order to do that, they have hired an assassin to kill the bootleggers.
But there’s one more wrinkle – the bootleg version of the virus can be transmitted through sexual contact and other bodily fluid exchanges, ala AIDS. When this happens, it can produce the same beautifying effects as the controlled version, but only temporarily. It then becomes lethal in horrifying ways. (The sufferers have fits of rage accompanied by super strength, then basically explode after their body temperatures reach astronomical levels.)
Because of the STD nature of the bootleg, the assassin has to keep killing people who have had sex with the sufferers. Given that the sufferers are unnaturally beautiful, they have no shortage of sexual partners, so the assassin is a busy man.
This series seems to focus on rear nudity.
Rebecca Hall’s character in episode 1 (presumed to be body double Viola Marini)
Rebecca Hall’s character in episode 2 (no nudity, and probably includes a combination of Rebecca Hall and Viola Marini)
Jessica Alexander in episode 2
Emily Borromeo (??) in episode 3
One ridiculously inside joke for baby boomers: a plastic surgeon promises to transform a Jeremy into a Chad.
(A “Chad” is his shorthand for a handsome alpha male.)
In the musical duo, it was the other way around. Chad was the nerdy-looking one with the thick glasses. Jeremy Clyde, despite nerdy-sounding first and last names, was the one who made the girls swoon. I once had their album, “Yesterday’s Gone,” and I once performed “A Summer Song” with the woman who would later become my wife. Both of those songs always bring back memories. Damn, that was long, long ago.
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Rebecca Hall nudography
2006 – Wide Sargasso Sea
2009 – Red Riding: 1974
2011 – The Awakening
2012 – Parade’s End, part 2
2017 – Permission
2017 – Professor Marston and the Wonder Woman
From the comments:
We were talking about mother-daughter nudity a while back. Rebecca Hall’s mom, the late opera singer Maria Ewing, famously did full frontal nudity onstage in Salome. It was directed by Rebecca’s father, Peter Hall. Here is the full Dance of the Seven Veils on YouTube. Although she presents as Caucasian, Rebecca Hall is actually part Black on her mother’s side.


