Ryan Murphy’s shows aren’t sexy and scary but “sexy” and “scary,” and that’s absurdly true of The Shards, an adaptation of American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis’ 2023 autofiction novel whose every look, gesture, and innuendo is deliberately, laughably affected.
An ‘80s pantomime that blends hedonistic L.A. preppy glitz and glamour with malevolent serial-killer suspense, it’s an ideal marriage of two artists infatuated—to a risible degree—with superficial hot-and-gory titillation.
The Shards (August 5, FX) is a make-believe version of Ellis’ senior year at Buckley prep school, where Bret Easton Ellis (Igby Rigney) endeavors to write Less Than Zero (first as a book, then as a screenplay treatment) as he copes with his social clique’s upheaval thanks to the arrival of Robert Mallory (Homer Gere). Bret first spies Robert at a 1980 theatrical screening of The Shining.
A year later, Robert shows up at school pretending that he’s never seen The Shining and acting like a smug, creepy pretty boy whose invasive arrogance knows no bounds.
This allows Robert to fit right in with this crew. Bret is a robotic yuppie who, in wooden and overly writerly narration, constantly name-drops material items (cars, clothing brands, perfumes, etc.) while discussing “feelings” that he doesn’t seem to actually have.
Everything is a pose in The Shards, and that extends to Bret’s closest friends, who fit various hackneyed archetypes. Debbie Schaffer (Hayes Warner), Bret’s girlfriend, is a privileged blonde bombshell whose dad, Terry (American Beauty’s Wes Bentley), is a sinister gay movie producer and whose mom, Liz (Westworld’s Evan Rachel Wood), is a bitter never-was alcoholic trophy wife.
Susan Reynolds (Kaia Gerber, daughter of Cindy Crawford), on the other hand, is perfection personified, a straight-A class-president beauty who’s in love with doting quarterback boyfriend Thom Wright (Graham Campbell), who has lingering daddy issues due to his father’s abandonment.
There isn’t a single thing about these individuals and their relationships that isn’t cut from a moth-eaten cloth, and their interpersonal dramas would be merely the stuff of Beverly Hills, 90210 except for the fact that Murphy and Ellis infuse the proceedings with over-the-top homoeroticism.
Bret is bisexual but keeping it (and his trysts with Owen Painter’s stoner Matt) a secret from Debbie, and his suspicious infatuation with Robert is laced with desire. So too is every other element of the show, whose carnality—complete with a subplot concerning classmate Ryan’s (Daniel Dale) participation in the evolving porn industry—swiftly goes from intriguing to farcical to embarrassing.
Directed by Murphy, Michael Uppendahl, Max Minghella, and Crystle Roberson Dorsey, The Shards is a trashy melodrama that thinks it’s being transgressive by occasionally dipping into X-rated smuttiness via dialogue that elicits simultaneous eye rolls and horrified cringing.
Such childish posturing is ironically apt for a series whose protagonist, Bret, can’t stop talking about his transition from childhood to adulthood. Given how many scenes involve teenagers dining, chatting, smoking, and drinking at posh restaurants and bars, it quickly resembles a lavish game of children playing dress-up.
Speaking of which, there’s a serial killer afoot in this affluent SoCal enclave, and The Shards milks his (or her) reign of terror for juvenile thrills. The fiend in question wears a black mask and matching leather gloves like a reject from a Dario Argento giallo, snatches pets as well as people, and likes to stitch his victims together with fish—thus earning himself the goofy nickname The Trawler.
The killer’s spree hits close to home for Bret and company, beginning with one acquaintance’s disappearance, but it’s not immediately clear who’s responsible for the area’s crimes, since there’s also a post-Charles Manson cult (The Riders of the Afterlife) drawing bloody pentagrams on walls.
The Shards is driven by Robert, whose presence upends the friend group’s fundamental dynamics, both because he immediately sets his sights on Susan—thus angering Thom and Bret, who not-so-covertly pines for her—and because Bret instantly decides that he’s the Trawler and bugs everyone about it to no end.
Gere (son of Richard) has the smuggest face in the bunch, and Murphy and his fellow directors never miss an opportunity to portray him as menacingly dark and sexy. Then again, everyone gets their opportunity to say or do something that suggests they could possibly be the Trawler—a whodunit structure undermined by overwrought teasing.
Prioritizing appearance over talent is another of The Shards’ weaknesses, as its cast delivers uniformly hollow, skin-deep performances, including Jordan Roth as Steven, Wes’ cunning assistant and an additional Trawler suspect. Sensationalism has always been Murphy’s stock and trade, and in that regard, his latest doesn’t deviate from formula, and his fondness for mannered stylization, ‘80s-isms (especially needle drops), and a cool, detached storytelling perspective mark him as a kindred spirit to Ellis.
Nonetheless, their collaboration is little more than lurid kabuki, save for those brief instances when it evokes the alluring, vapid ostentatiousness of its milieu—a glittering metropolis where image is everything, and avarice is omnipresent.
Parents are nowhere to be found in The Shards, and despite Bret saying this is a symptom of the greed-is-good times, it mostly feels like an extension of the show’s kids-as-adults silliness. The Trawler makes breathy prank phone calls and tortures innocents by beach bonfires and in basement cages, but he’s a pedestrian specter, and the series’ insinuations about the Riders of the Afterlife are such obvious red herrings that they function as filler. Unfortunately, there’s a healthy amount of padding in this first season’s nine episodes, and practically all of it is set to Bret’s tedious voiceover ruminations about love, danger, and cinema.
“What a powerful anesthetic vulgarity can be,” muses Bret, and though this sentiment seems a touch self-referential, most of The Shards is leaden and self-satisfied, highlighted by Bret being told, “Your writing is so adult.” Alas, it is not, at least as far as this adaptation is concerned.
Immature through and through, Murphy and Ellis’ tawdry teen soap opera-via-The Silence of the Lambs is infinitely pleased with its own pretentions and yet, strangely, refrains from going whole-hog garish. It’s a training-wheels take on two genres that does justice to neither.
