The first two episodes of The Shards weren’t great television, but they did feel surprisingly true to Bret Easton Ellis’s novel. That’s not the case for this week’s pair of episodes, which layer on the teen-movie cliches and campy humor in ways that only undercut the mood of the novel. In fact, it seems Ellis has left the building entirely at this point. We’re in Murphy Land now.
To be fair, both “Help Me! Rhonda!” and “Robert’s Party” have some thematic threads in common with last week’s episodes, especially when it comes to our protagonist. Aside from Bret’s occasional rambles about Manson murders and his desire to emulate Joan Didion’s writing, he tends to have the same few things on his mind. He’s continually disappointed that none of his privileged friends seem to care about the disappearances of two of their classmates, at least one of whom really meant something to him. He’s especially frustrated that nobody believes him that the new kid in school, Robert Mallory, could be a violent psychopath. And on a broader level, Bret is increasingly aware that he and his friends are on the verge of crossing some Rubicon into adulthood, play-acting as grown-ups instead of savoring their final days of youthful innocence.
That’s all well and good, and the show does excel when it leans into Bret’s naïveté. He’s wise beyond his years but self-righteous, the type of guy who shows up to parties just to judge his debauchery-driven peers and claim to be “observing, not partying” even though he’s doing the same as them. (He’s like Riverdale’s Jughead Jones in that way.) Bret is still a teenager, with all the confusion and impulsivity that entails, and it’s nice when we get a peek at his real feelings, like when he sneaks into Matt’s pool house to smell his uniform and cry over his missing “friend.” There’s also his ongoing tense dynamic with Terry, who clearly wants more from the kid than just his script. Watching Bret navigate that queasy evolving dynamic is still tense, and I’m both curious and nervous to see it approach a breaking point.
But most of the actual character work here is thin, including the underdeveloped dynamic between Bret and Matt. Why exactly is Bret so convinced that Robert is behind everything going on here? The Thom/Susan/Robert love triangle isn’t the most interesting way of building up Robert’s supposedly suspicious behavior; he’s just acting like a typical horny privileged kid who thinks he can take whatever or whomever he wants from anyone else. There’s little texture there, just Susan and Robert suddenly blatantly flirting through every social event and Thom watching jealously until he snaps and lashes out at them both at Robert’s party. There’s some sort of love story playing out here at the margins, glimpsed from afar by Bret and by us—Susan seems to really care about Robert, to the point that she’s aware of his medications and the risk of drinking on them—but there’s no insight into what attracts her to him or what truly went stale in her relationship with Thom.
I like the idea that Bret may be the “psycho” here, in Susan’s words, and that he’s actually the bully, not Robert. After all, taunting the guy with the rumor that he killed his own mother might provoke him into a reaction—and Robert sure does react—but it’s not going to do anything to unmask him as the Trawler. The ending takeaway of “Robert’s Party” is more about Bret’s loss of innocence upon realizing that he and his best friend can’t tell each other the truth anymore. He has entered the “world of adults and death,” in his words.
This all works fine enough for the time being. It’s predictable but watchable. What really throws off these two episodes is the introduction of a bunch of new stuff to pad out the time, most of which has no reason to be there and hardly fits the established tone of the show (let alone the source material). For example, I couldn’t help laughing at the abrupt appearance of Ivy Wolk as Rhonda, a disco roller derby-obsessed student with Tourettes who has apparently been around this whole time but only shows up here to become the Trawler’s next Buckley victim. She feels like an empty plot device characterized solely by the quirk of her neurological condition (and the good-natured yet condescending adulation of the other Buckley kids).
We do see Rhonda a few more times after her abduction early in “Help Me! Rhonda!” But the show doesn’t gain much by returning to her and Matt in cages repeatedly, and showing so much of the Trawler risks diminishing his impact, especially given the (all things considered) pretty basic psychotic-serial-kidnapper look and methodology.
Building out supporting characters like Debbie and Ryan is a much better use of the show’s time … if, you know, any of it was interesting or fit the vibe of the show. I’ll hold off for now on criticizing the outdated Hairspray-inspired subplot of Debbie’s obsession with appearing on the cable access show Dance Off!, because there’s bigger fish to fry—like Ryan’s bizarre spotlight at the top of “Robert’s Party,” a cold open that establishes him as a working teenage porn star. A teenage porn star tasked with “breaking in” the new talent, who happens to be Liz Schaffer.
Like… what? How does this version of Ryan square with the one who messed around with Bret? For that matter, why exactly does he follow up this insane request by pursuing and then hooking up with Debbie, the amateur porn star’s daughter? The episode frames this as simply himbo behavior, but Ryan’s blankness reads as a lack of consistency and personality for the character, not a deliberate or amusing character trait.
Ryan and Debbie’s run-in with a new threat—a man with long, stiff hair who must be cult leader Bruce (Gus Halper), —also doesn’t work nearly as well as it should. The cutting back and forth with Robert’s meltdown produces some frantic slasher-esque mania, and Bruce referring to Thom by name provides a little bit of intrigue, but the scene just isn’t scary or suspenseful the way it should be once Bruce actually emerges from his hiding place. I’m open to The Shards exploring new tones, and I’m certainly okay with deviations from the text, but the show still needs to work on its own terms. Right now, I’m not sure it is.
Stray observations
- • Possibly the clumsiest expositional line in a pair of clumsy episodes: “I love it when we skip lunch on the Quad and kick it at the Hamlet.”
- • In theory, learning more about Thom’s parents’ divorce should make us care about him more, but there’s very little to grab onto there.
- • I saw that Silence Of The Lambs editing trickery coming from a mile away with Bret seeming to find Rhonda.
- • I guess it’s nice to see Dot-Marie Jones (aka Glee’s Coach Beiste) show up as Jan Butch Banxxx.
- • I like Bret’s musings about how the kids won’t remember the last moment they felt like kids until later, but they feel a bit overly written, another example of something that works better on the page (and better from the older, reflective Bret’s point of view).
- • Debbie’s frustration with Susan for refusing to throw her nemesis out of the party comes a bit out of nowhere, but felt pretty realistic and poignant to me. I’m curious what she knows and thinks about Susan’s obvious burgeoning relationship with Robert.
- • “You’re too big.” “It’s not always this big. It’s just when I’m hard.”
- • The Go-Go’s “We Got the Beat” was an excellent choice for the scene when Robert attacks and then kisses Thom.
- • Debbie lying about why she and Ryan had their shirts off is played as an “oh shit” moment, but we know Bret wouldn’t give a shit about Debbie playing him, especially given his own indiscretions (with the same guy!). If anything, he’d be hurt by Ryan, not her.
Keep scrolling for more great stories.