The Shards TV show: Bret Easton Ellis and Ryan Murphy’s paean to 1980s hedonism is a dull affair
You would think a tie-up between Bret Easton Ellis and Ryan Murphy would result in a maximalist series dripping in excess, and yet, The Shards is not that.
In theory, the creative marriage of Bret Easton Ellis and Ryan Murphy make a lot of sense.
Ellis is American literature’s enfant terrible of the 1980s and 1990s, having successfully shocked conventional sensibilities with American Psycho, a work of such gratuitous violence that copies of the book are still sold in shrink-wrap, the cover plastered with an R rating.
Murphy is the prolific TV producer whose slate veers towards over-the-top sensationalism, whether that be the camp American Horror Story series, the superficial excess of All’s Fair or the ghastly tastelessness of true crime anthology Monster.
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By continuing you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy.Murphy’s lurid thriller The Beauty felt as if it owed a lot to Ellis’s 1998 novel Glamorama.
Both men have a commitment to maximalism, so it makes a lot of sense for Murphy to take on Ellis’s most recent novel, The Shards, the author’s first book in more than a decade.
And yet…
What should have been a hedonistic adventure through the underworld of 1980s Los Angeles privilege and deviance is strangely dull and impactless. You want to be grossed out or shocked, maybe even a little bit titillated, but this TV adaptation is flat.
It’s not that it’s empty, which it is, but that isn’t new for Ryan. It’s that it’s just not that interesting, and for The Shards, that is the greatest crime.
The book and the series is a wildly dramatised autofiction drawn very loosely on Ellis’s final year of high school in 1981, and the lead character shares his name with its creator. Just as Ellis’s characters on the page have been unreliable narrators, so is the Bret of this series.
Bret (Igby Rigney) is a child of wealth and neglect. He has access to every material good as well as spaces that most people would never dare enter. His parents are off in Europe trying to save their marriage, leaving the 17-year-old teen alone in LA.
He attends the ritzy private school Buckley (Ellis’s actual alma mater), alongside his friends Susan (Kaia Gerber), the class president, Thom (Graham Campbell), a football star, and Debbie (Hayes Warner), Bret’s girlfriend and the daughter of a powerful film producer (Wes Bentley).
Bret is closeted and is secretly hooking up with stoner Matt (Owen Painter).
Two events kick off around the same time. One is a serial killer nicknamed the Trawler, who has been haunting the rich citizens of the San Fernando Valley and Hollywood Hills, and is perhaps connected to a Satanic cult.
There’s a sequence that leads to being a Trawler victim – first your pets disappear, then furniture is rearranged, an upside down pentagram appears and then you’re abducted, the corpse later mutilated and publicly displayed in a garish manner.
The other is the arrival of new student Robert Mallory (Homer Gere), an outwardly charismatic teen who Bret immediately distrusts when Robert lies about a previous encounter between the two.
Bret is persuaded that Robert is the Trawler, and goes about trying to prove it, especially after he discovers that Robert has been in a mental health facility.
The Shards is a surface level exploration of the decrepit and careless privilege of its milieu, a place where your girlfriend’s father propositions you, where school principals snort cocaine in their office and where there’s no adult supervision of these teens.
Ellis’s breakout novel was Less Than Zero, which he published while he was still at university, and which featured college students on break in LA, mired in the world of drugs and sex. When that was adapted into a film with Robert Downey Jr and James Spader, it was turned into an old-fashioned cautionary tale.
At least The Shards isn’t trying to twist its dark core into something more palatable for the moral majority. Ellis was involved with this adaptation and he wrote the first two episodes which hums with an energy that is missing from the seven remaining episodes.
It meanders and gets stuck in subplots before a denouement that really plays up the unreliable narrator of it all (Bret’s deliberately affectless voiceover runs across the whole show).
As they’re rendered on screen, none of the characters sustain your interest over the duration of the series, because they’re not as sharp as Ellis’s writing, and neither is the series.
The one time you want something pulpy, macabre and exaggerated, Murphy fails to deliver.
It’s all just a bit meh.
The Shards is streaming on Disney+
