Plot: A seductive drama series from executive producer Ryan Murphy, based on the acclaimed bestselling novel by Bret Easton Ellis. Set against the vivid backdrop of 1980s Los Angeles, the series follows a group of privileged high school seniors at an elite prep school as they navigate identity, sex, jealousy, obsession and the dangers lurking beneath the surface of American adolescence.
Review: There are few creative partnerships that seem more ideal than Ryan Murphy and Bret Easton Ellis. Murphy is renowned for his risque and boundary-pushing genre projects like Nip/Tuck, American Horror Story, and Glee, while Ellis is the author of 1980s-set classics Less Than Zero and American Psycho. In recent years, Ellis has toyed with metafiction that blends biography and horror in his books Lunar Park and The Shards, with the latter serving as the basis for the new FX series of the same name. Using the teen melodrama of Less Than Zero with the serial-killer conceits of American Horror Story, Murphy and Ellis have united to craft an adaptation that plays to both their creative strengths, led by a cast of familiar faces and newcomers. The Shards is at once a throwback to the excesses of the 1980s, told with a firmly tongue-in-cheek sense of humor that adds to the bloody, violent, and sexy world of the rich and spoiled teenagers of Los Angeles. Basically, The Shards is quintessential Bret Easton Ellis and Ryan Murphy.
Writing himself into his own fictionalized story, The Shards follows Bret Easton Ellis (Midnight Mass’s Igby Rigney) in 1981. Living in Los Angeles, Bret aspires to be a writer. Bret is dating Debbie Schaffer (Hayes Warner), the sexy blonde daughter of Hollywood movie producer Terry (Wes Bentley) and his wife Liz (Evan Rachel Wood). Bret has a secret crush on class president Susan Reynolds (Kaia Gerber), who is dating Thom Wright (Graham Campbell) while hiding the fact that he is gay. When new student Robert Mallory (Homer Gere) arrives at the start of their senior year, it coincides with the rampage of a serial killer known as The Trawler. Bret suspects that Robert may be the killer, but everyone in the friend group begins to suspect one another as they lie, cheat, and plot against one another, as their classmates are brutally murdered and displayed publicly in a horrific manner. Basically, it is what you would expect from an average season of American Horror Story, combined with the pop culture references to the decade that Bret Easton Ellis has become synonymous with.
Narrated by Igby Rigney, who affects an entitled accent reminiscent of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, The Shards revels in the coked-up freedom that wealthy teenagers in Los Angeles could get away with almost fifty years ago. They smoke, they have sex, and they do it all without their parents giving a damn. The few adults in the series are messed up themselves, with Wes Bentley’s Terry and Evan Rachel Wood’s Liz drugged out of their minds and experiencing promiscuous affairs while their kids do the same. There is also Terry’s assistant, Steven Reinhardt (Jordan Roth), who cuts a mysterious figure with access to the household’s secrets and seems to know more than he lets on. As Bret follows Robert both as an erotic obsession and as fodder for his own writing aspirations, the series gets more and more complicated with red herrings and misdirections leading to almost every member of the cast being a suspect in the killings happening around town. Each episode is chock-full of clues and twists that make things increasingly complicated, leading towards a finale that ends in a place very different from the source material.
This series is structured as the first season of an ongoing series rather than a limited run, and it adapts the full novel. Because so much is thrown into these ten episodes, it almost feels like we deserve more closure at the end instead of a lead into a sophomore run. But, within these episodes, we have multiple star-making turns from some nepo babies. Kaia Gerber, daughter and doppelganger of Cindy Crawford, has worked with Ryan Murphy before, but this is her most substantial role, giving her a showcase to prove she has the iconic looks inherited from her mom and the acting skills to match. Equally, newcomer Homer Gere, son of Richard Gere and Carey Lowell, makes for a mysterious figure perfectly suited to the era of The Shards. Lead Igby Rigney does a good job of emulating the real Bret Easton Ellis through a fictionalized lens, and it’s a solid entry into this debaucherous world that shows just about everyone as nude as you can get on basic cable. The mystery itself feels secondary to following these teens on their regular schedule of drugs and sex, but when the serial killer plot comes into play, it adds a nice layer to the mix.
Ryan Murphy and Bret Easton Ellis share writing credits on the first two episodes, with Murphy directing multiple episodes and writing others. Murphy sets the tone in the premiere, which is carried into later episodes by Michael Uppendahl (Fargo, Glee), Crystle Roberson Dorsey (Power, Sacrifice), and Max Minghella (Shell). Luca Guadagnino was originally attached to the project, and his visual style would have worked well, but Murphy and Ellis dig into the copious pop culture mainstays of the early 1980s to fill out the visuals of the series, including recurring references to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, as well as tons of needle drops from the countless 1981 hits that fit the tone of the show. The Shards suffers from the same problem as many Ryan Murphy shows, the repetitive nature of the excess can sometimes border on overload, but it all depends on how much you love his signature storytelling style. Ellis is equally at the mercy of his own excess, but the series does offer a talented ensemble that all have a lot of fun playing with the period’s hair and fashion.
If you are a fan of Ryan Murphy or Bret Easton Ellis, you will love The Shards. It hits the same notes as their prior efforts, but the partnership of the two leads to a satisfying guilty pleasure of a show. If you are just a casual fan or are enticed by the series’ period and subject matter, you may be better off watching it weekly as it is released rather than binge-watching it. There is a lot to like in the series, especially the impressive turns from Kaia Gerber and Homer Gere, but as with prior projects from both creators, The Shards is a lot to take in. It does not reach the heights of Less Than Zero or American Psycho, but it may be the best adaptation of a Bret Easton Ellis novel in decades. In hindsight, I think this series would have been better served as a single, limited run rather than the start of an ongoing show, but, as with most of Ryan Murphy’s projects, there is an audience out there that will likely connect with The Shards and earn it successive seasons.
The Shards premieres with two episodes on August 5th on FX and Hulu.