When it was announced that Bret Easton Ellis would be teaming up with Ryan Murphy to adapt The Shards, Ellis’s 2023 semi-autobiographical novel, the news weirdly made sense. Murphy may lack the artistry or thoughtfulness of Luca Guadagnino, who was originally set to direct the series, but he and Ellis have a lot in common. Both are gay men in their early 60s whose output has attracted controversy, usually related to all the gratuitous sex and violence (and sexual violence). Whether American Psycho reads as emptily provocative trash or a brilliant work of satire will depend on who’s reading it, and the same goes for much of Murphy’s recent work—though I doubt Grotesquerie, All’s Fair, or the anthology series Monster will inspire as much spirited conversation as Ellis’ most famous and polarizing works.
The Shards could leave more of a mark, though it’s too early to say if the peculiar appeal of Ellis’ source material translates to a visual medium. This is a teen thriller, in theory, but it’s not much interested in soapy drama in the same way as other recent additions to the genre—stuff like Cruel Summer, or A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, or We Were Liars, or Outer Banks. This one is less about action and massive plot twists and more about mood and psychology. It’s about a group of rich, beautiful, entitled kids at the elite Buckley prep school in the San Fernando Valley; it’s about their privilege, their obliviousness, their egos, but also the time and place that shaped them.
The first episode immediately situates us in that setting. It’s 1981, and a violent home invader eventually nicknamed The Trawler is operating at the height of the golden era for serial killers. The pattern is roughly consistent, established in one early scene: a girl’s pet goes missing; she receives repeated calls with only heavy breathing on the other end; eventually she gets nabbed, killed, and transformed into some gruesome display involving her dead pet. (Something similar occurs with the Griffin statue at Buckley, defiled by dead koi.) In the second episode of the week, we’ll learn that there’s also a cult from Ojai called the Riders of the Afterlife that may or may not be responsible for some of the murders (but probably not). They’re led by a creepy ex-English teacher named Bruce, and they’re behind a number of recent violent home invasions.
At this early juncture, the Riders of the Afterlife don’t seem to matter much to the story; they’re more local color, a red herring that calls to mind Charles Manson and the Tate–LaBianca murders over a decade before. The Trawler gets more focus than the cult, but even he isn’t a big focus early on, especially in the first episode.
The premiere is most concerned with establishing the central friend group of this story. There’s Bret (Igby Rigney), of course, our quiet, cute, closeted audience surrogate and Ellis’ self-insert. He’s dating horse-girl Deborah Schaffer (Hayes Warner), but seems more obsessed with his two best friends: queen bee Susan Reynolds (Kaia Gerber) and her quarterback boyfriend Thom Wright (Graham Campbell). Bret is bisexual, broadly speaking, but he struggles to feel any attraction to any girls not named Susan, his own girlfriend included. He gets more sexual satisfaction from his secret hook-ups with other senior boys in their extended friend group, including Ryan Vaughn (Daniel Dale) and class stoner Matt Kellner (Owen Painter). Even his girlfriend’s dad, Hollywood producer Terry Schaffer (Wes Bentley, hamming it up), is interested in Bret.
The pilot does a solid job laying all this out, even if there isn’t a strong distinction yet between Bret’s various love interests. Bret in general is a bit of an enigma, and I can’t decide yet whether Rigney pulls off the performance or not. The character is withdrawn, sensitive, and vaguely alien by nature, viewing this strange social milieu at a remove and commenting on it internally, so I suppose Rigney’s slightly stilted way of speaking works for the role. But Ellis’ discursive, ruminative prose also may work better on the page than on screen, especially in this droning voiceover format. The premiere nicely captures some of the sunny malaise of the book, but it almost feels too faithful. It could stand to lose 70% of the voiceover exposition and let the dialogue and visuals tell most of the story.
The real inciting incident of The Shards is the arrival of a mysterious, gorgeous new student by the name of Robert Mallory (Homer Gere), the real co-lead. I’m not sure yet if Gere really has the juice to pull off Robert’s magnetism, but for now he’s compelling enough as a charming manipulator and liar with a shady past. Outside his stated interest in the already-taken Susan, his motivations aren’t clear yet. This story is firmly rooted in Bret’s perspective, and much of it is spent building up the mythology of Robert Mallory, this walking red flag of a man, this “virus” bent on infecting Bret’s friend group and life. For these first couple episodes, that foreshadowing is enough.
How does the mystery of Robert relate to the Trawler? That isn’t clear yet, though other characters (Debbie, even Bret himself) are receiving the same creepy calls, and Robert seems as obsessed with this group of kids as Bret is. Matt is one of the many people Robert speaks to in his first week at Buckley, and then he becomes The Trawler’s first male victim, the biggest stakes-raising moment across these two episodes. That final scene with Bret receiving the audio is legitimately disturbing, and injecting this moody story with some real consequences and slasher-movie pacing can only help it.
“Don’t You Want Me” is a less eventful episode than the premiere, in some ways, but it’s also nice to sink a little deeper into the story without the burden of exposition. Bret’s lunch with Terry, for example, is full of name-dropping (Allan Carr, Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne) and fraught with sexual tension, and it’s still a little unclear how one-sided the dynamic is. Bentley really plays up Terry’s lasciviousness, but it’s fun and a little scary to see how far he’ll go in these initial meetings. He seems intent on juggling this new transactional mentorship with his daughter’s interests, and that can only lead to trouble down the line.
I’m doubtful The Shards will be one of Ryan Murphy’s best, or that he’s the ideal fit for adapting a story that resists easy answers, lingering instead in awful ambiguities. But there’s something that makes sense about this collaboration, even if it all adds up to less than the sum of its parts—whether the series succeeds in satirizing vapidity or ultimately embodies it.
Stray observations
- • I do enjoy the sequence of Bret following Robert in his car, especially because it plays out in present tense, without excessive reframing in voiceover. Bret makes every rookie mistake and goes from the follower to the followed.
- • “When you talk to me, you’re really talking to yourself, dude.” Deep.
- • What’s the deal with Steven, Terry’s assistant? He’s a weird and campy character, and I can’t tell if he’s a threat or if he’s trying to protect these kids from the real threat.
- • Evan Rachel Wood is great as Debbie’s volatile alcoholic mother, Liz. She plays totally different shades in her two scenes in these episodes, and the calmer scene with Debbie might be even more unnerving than the unhinged scene with Bret.
- • I’d be remiss not to mention the important meta element here: Richard Gere and Cindy Crawford were married in the ’90s, then separately had kids that are now co-starring in a show together. And they might even fuck, if Robert gets what he wants.
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