A fruitful collaboration between Ryan Murphy and Bret Easton Ellis sounds, at once, inevitable and impossible. Murphy is a maximalist in every sense—a superproducer pumping out show after operatic show, writing characters who say the quiet part of every story out loud—and one of TV’s most influential promoters of inclusive, identity-politics-driven programming. Ellis, for his part, is known for the minimalistic prose of his generation-defining debut novel, Less Than Zero, and a more recent culture-warrior phase in which he has inveighed against the same “fake-woke corporate culture” within the entertainment industry that some might say Murphy epitomizes. On the other hand, both men are inveterate provocateurs, unafraid to alienate audiences and fascinated by the psychology of psycho killers (see: Ellis’ American Psychoand a huge chunk of Murphy’s output) and the interplay between pop culture and real life. Born on the boomer-Generation X cusp, they also remember what it was like to grow up gay in the ’80s.
In The Shards, which the two adapted from Ellis’ 2023 novel, the synergy among their experiences outweighs but doesn’t erase the irreconcilability of their perspectives. The story at its surface, an autofictional but otherwise familiar account of a serial killer stalking students at Ellis’ high school in 1981, gleams with the stylish production design, savvy genre pastiche, and elaborate set pieces for which Murphy is known. Yet it’s clear the show, premiering with two episodes on FX and Hulu on Aug. 5, has greater ambitions. In the connections it makes to cultural touchstones of its period and voiceover narration from a present-day Bret, The Shardsattempts to say something profound about the transition from youth to adulthood. Blame a mismatched creative team or the visual medium’s inherent privileging of images over ideas; the shallow stuff wins out.
Like Less Than Zero—and in some ways a prequel to that novel, which took place during a college break, though Bret (played by an unnervingly self-possessed Igby Rigney) is also writing the book while this story unfolds—The Shardsfollows a clique of rich, debauched teens in L.A. Bret is noncommittally dating Debbie (rising pop star Hayes Warner), a ruthless go-getter, while secretly hooking up with guys. Their best friends are the class golden couple, gorgeous student body president Susan (Kaia Gerber), who wins every popularity contest even though she’d prefer not to, and Thom (Graham Campbell), an all-American dreamboat whose sadness no one perceives beneath an expression of what Bret calls “intriguing blankness.” Whether it’s the love Bret harbors for Susan or a fundamental lack of attraction to women in general that keeps him distant for Debbie is a question that lingers in the background as his identity crisis deepens.
Senior year is starting and the group’s parents have long since checked out. (Bret’s are apparently vacationing overseas.) Which suits the performatively jaded teens, who chain-smoke at restaurants with white tablecloths and traverse the city without curfew or constraint. Only Debbie’s monstrous family enters the frame. Her father, Terry (Wes Bentley), is a stock predatory movie producer with an eye for underage boys. His wife, Liz (Evan Rachel Wood), is a sneak preview of Debbie’s future, self-medicating with drugs, alcohol, and wrathful outbursts. The fourth member of the household is Terry’s lurking aide, an androgynous aesthete named Steven (theater producer Jordan Roth, playing up the character’s feline strangeness). When the situation calls for a responsible adult, these are not the people you want on hand.
They’re who the kids are stuck with, though, when a girl’s mangled body is found fastened to a tennis net and their classmates start disappearing. Bret is certain that the handsome new boy in school, Robert Mallory (Homer Gere), is the culprit. But his logic—that Robert must be a killer because he denies having been at the screening of The Shining where Bret first spotted him—is pretty flimsy. For some reason, Bret can’t get his friends to care about the murders. They’re too busy planning homecoming festivities and angling to get on dance-contest TV shows. Maybe their denial can be shrugged off as typical teen self-involvement, but it doesn’t explain why he seems more invested in the case than police and even some parents of the missing.
The Shardsis dense with references. To make sense of the show beyond the plot’s generic teenage politicking and serial-killer thrills, you must know that The Shiningis a horror story about a writer becoming violently unhinged; that its other Jack Nicholson footnote, Chinatown, is synonymous with systemic evil too entrenched to fight; that the financial disaster that was Michael Cimino’s 1980 feature Heaven’s Gatesymbolizes the end of New Hollywood’s auteur-driven ’70s renaissance, leaving the industry to chase youthful faces and shiny trends. (Bret gives a Patrick-Bateman-esque monologue about how music videos are the future of art.) The casting piles new signifiers atop the source material. Gerber is the spookily identical daughter of Cindy Crawford, the ultimate Gen X beauty. Gere shares a square jaw with his father, Richard, whose breakthrough movie, American Gigolo—another tale of sex and murder in L.A., whose writer-director, Paul Schrader, worked with Ellis on The Canyons—was released just in time to be referenced by The Shards’ characters. Richard Gere was married to Crawford in the early ’90s. Gerber and Homer Gere don’t share any parents, but the connection adds a pseudo-incestuous twinge to their characters’ mutual attraction. Dig deeper, and you’ll find that Homer Gere’s mother, the actor Carrie Lowell, was once married to Griffin Dunne, the nephew of Joan Didion, whose work both Ellis and his Shardsalter ego idolize.
Because so much of the meaning here resides in allusions that will elude most viewers under 40, Murphy and Ellis have essentially made two shows in one—an arch teen murder soap in the vein of Riverdale–Pretty Little Liars, and something more layered and harder to pin down for the older crowd. While the former benefits from the sensory intensity of Murphy’s storytelling (The Shards’ swimming pools achieve the incandescent blueness of Donald Trump’s Reflecting Pool dreams), and Ellis’ influence seems to have reined in some of his co-creator’s usual excesses, only the latter feels like something new. Yet the more thoughtful elements remain at the margins. It’s intriguing when the narrator says, for instance, “Matt had never felt about me the way I felt about him, which would be a recurring theme for the rest of my life.” The older Bret’s wistfulness, his frustration with a precocious teen Bret who traded his childhood innocence for an adult author’s life before he’d developed the self-knowledge that comes with genuine maturity, peeks through the surface without quite penetrating it.
The Shardsunravels in its final few episodes. One plays on the name of the crew’s hangout, Hamburger Hamlet, drawing Murphy-ish parallels between the characters and Shakespeare’s tragic personages that are so overwrought, they can’t be salvaged by self-awareness. The bigger disappointment is a bombshell ending, albeit a narratively ambiguous one, that fizzles rather than explodes. The psychological escalation that’s supposed to lead us there never fully happens. This show about the consequences of limited introspection suffers them as well.
