Summary
The Shards gets off to a good start, vibes-wise, staying true to the source novel but also feeling of a piece with Ryan Murphy’s usual brand of schlock-horror sensationalism.
There are few names which, when heard in conjunction, can cause a visceral reaction, but I’d argue that Ryan Murphy and Bret Easton Ellis are among them. The king of melodramatic shlock-horror TV and the king of complex upper-class coming-of-age dysfunction, together at last – if there’s one thing evident from the two-part premiere of FX/Hulu’s The Shards, it’s that sometimes there isn’t a great deal of difference between a match made in heaven and one made in hell.
This is to say that the adaptation of Ellis’s same-titled 2023 autofiction novel, which chronicles a lot of his senior year at the Buckley School with the made-up flourish of a sadistic serial killer operating in the background, brings out the best of both creatives, which brings out the worst of human nature. It’s a tight and faithful adaptation – at least for now – that very much embodies the tone of Ellis’s work, which is no mean feat given it’s set in early-‘80s Los Angeles and has to evoke that time and place on top of everything else.
A cold open in which Bret watches The Shining and complains about the deviations from the novel seems to lay the show’s stall out, but it doesn’t seem to be taking the approach of reinventing the wheel. The prologue is functional more than anything. It introduces Bret – oh, yeah, Bret Easton Ellis is the main character – and his fascination with a new kid who has transferred into town for his senior year. It also introduces the Trawler, a serial killer with chilling hallmarks including kidnapping family pets, rearranging items in medicine cabinets, and heavy breathing down the phone.
A brief primer: Bret is dating Debbie, but is more in love with his best friend, Susan, who, along with her boyfriend, Thom, is the most popular kid in school. But Bret is also closeted and carrying on secretive but unserious affairs with classmates Matt and Ryan, essentially living a double life, since homosexuality wasn’t exactly in vogue at the time. Bret and his friends are well liked and admired and come from extremely wealthy families, none of whom seem to care what they’re up to very much (Bret’s parents, for instance, have disappeared on a months-long trip to Europe, leaving him largely in the care of their housekeeper, Rosa).
The most prominent parents we meet are Debbie’s – her father, Terry, who is obviously gay and doesn’t mind flaunting it among his daughter’s classmates, much to the consternation of his drunken wife, Liz. Bret is hoping that Terry, a Hollywood producer, might buy the novel he’s writing – which I’m fairly sure is the novel being adapted in a sort of meta flourish – so he’s willing to put up with his obvious eccentricities and provocations, but he’s still pretending to be into his daughter in a way that he can tell is fake but Debbie, sadly, cannot.
There’s a lot of this kind of push and pull in The Shards, characters being cautious with their own secrets even when the people they’re hiding them from can see through the façade. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the frosty dynamic that immediately emerges between Bret and new kid Robert, the handsome boy who he saw and immediately became obsessed with during that screening of The Shining, but Robert claims to have never been there and has a rehearsed backstory that Bret doesn’t think rings true. Bret responds in the sensible way by immediately fixating on Robert and his private conversations with Ryan and Matt, following him to the Sherman Oaks Galleria where Bret doesn’t have an especially good reason for being.
This dynamic is immediately interesting and odd; a bit flirty, a bit hostile, a bit mysterious. Robert seems to know more about Bret than anyone else does, perhaps more than he has even admitted to himself. His interest in Bret’s friends reads like hostility, which perhaps it is. There’s certainly enough of it going around, since at the end of The Shards Episode 1, the Trawler claims another victim, fish stuffed in her eye sockets and a dog’s head sewn on her shoulder. Bret, too, gets a staticky call begging him for help.
Igby Rigney and Homer Gere in The Shards Season 1 | Image via FX/Hulu
By extension, as we transition into Episode 2, “Don’t You Want Me”, Bret seems to be the only person who has noticed all the weird stuff happening. His pals are curiously unconcerned about serial killers, missing people (and missing pets!) and the school’s griffin mascot having been desecrated with dead koi fish. They’re similarly unconcerned about the arrival of a conveniently handsome stranger with a dodgy life story who may or may not have come to town directly from the loony bin.
To Bret’s friends, his refusal to trust Robert reads like jealousy, and his panic about recent shenanigans and the escalating actions of a cult called the Riders of the Afterlife, which may well be linked to the Trawler, who may well be several of its members instead of just a lone killer, just seems like him worrying without cause. Of course, we’re on Bret’s side here, since we’ve seen the crazy stuff first-hand, but his increasing alienation even among his own social circle is kind of the point.
Enter Robert. In the first episode, Bret had described Robert like a kind of invasive virus attacking his friendship group on a cellular level, and that definitely holds true here. His motivations are deliberately inscrutable, so it’s never totally obvious whether he’s trying to get a rise out of Bret or genuinely bond with him in the kind of boys-talk way that Bret loathes because he’s always having to perform his heterosexuality. Either way, though, it’s unsettling, both for Bret and the audience, neither of whom is quite able to tell what Robert’s up to.
A lot of the dramatic tension in The Shards comes from Bret being so hyperfocused on his personal life that he can’t see the forest for the trees in terms of what’s happening around him, but this is already a mixed bag in terms of success rate, because the show also requires Bret to be less vapid and thus more switched on than everyone around him. This sometimes creates a slightly odd tone, where the guy who was hyper-paranoid at the start of the episode would definitely have realised the implications of Matt’s fish going missing, a pentagram being drawn on one of his posters, and the heavy-breathing calls he’s receiving. But Bret’s too hung up on Matt’s hostility and its implications on their semi-serious fling to notice.
This same sentiment is echoed in Bret’s meeting with Terry, which starts out as an unusually friendly lunch during which Terry offers to immediately option Bret’s book as soon as it’s finished, but quickly becomes strangely personal when Terry, who has obviously intuited that Bret isn’t entirely straight, starts asking overly personal questions that have a threatening contour to them when Bret tries to push back. But even though he must know this guy can’t be trusted, Bret’s more concerned about getting his book sold. His warring identities and priorities are always trapping him in the middle, so when Susan announces that Matt has been missing for five days, Bret has to pretend not to have known him even though his panic must be palpable.
Matt’s not in a good way, of course. We know this, and so does Bret, who receives a tape in his mailbox containing an audio recording of Matt being force-fed his own fish and a lethal dose of LSD under torture. Bret can’t hold his stomach. But perhaps the real thing he’s struggling with is the fact that he should have seen the signs and was too self-important to notice.
