Bret Easton Ellis is a notoriously difficult author to adapt. While American Psycho is an uncontested masterpiece, film adaptations of his novels Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction were met with mixed critical reception and poor financial returns. Leave it to uber-producer/writer/director Ryan Murphy, then, to try and serialize Ellis in TV form with FX’s The Shards.
Billed as a semi-autobiographical account of his senior year, Ellis’ 2023 novel centers a proxy version of the author as protagonist: closeted, entitled, narcissistic, and filled with alternating ennui and paranoia. The latter element is racheted up several notches in the fall of 1980 when a serial killer begins to target both Bret and several of his “friends”, including his summer hook-up: stoner Matt Kellner.
The book The Shards is only partially interested in the Trawler, though; most of the time it’s about how Bret struggles with his sexuality (despite most people knowing, or at least suspecting, he’s gay). He has a girlfriend/beard in Debbie, a non-sexual crush on best friend Susan, and an actual sexual crush on Susan’s “golden retriever” boyfriend Thom.
Things change with the arrival of mysterious newcomer Robert Mallory, who Bret suspects may be the Trawler…principally because the new boy is immediately caught in a lie, and later because Bret is informed that Robert spent several months in a mental hospital.
All of this makes the book seem very plot driven, but as fans of Ellis know, his writing tends to be elliptical and repetitive, harkening back to the same situations, conversations, and conflicts over and over again. The book is about how fucked up Bret is from trying to maintain a facade of heterosexual normalcy, despite his repeated claims that he’s basically adopting a mask until he can graduate and escape Los Angeles to live an authentic life. In the interim, though, it’s all spirals, obsessions, paranoia, dissociation, and LOTS of drugs, jerking off, and occasionally having sex.
The nine episode series adaptation tries to replicate Ellis’ writing in ways that are both obvious (voice-over narration) and unsuccessful. So much of what makes the book work is the lack of anything happening: it’s a slog – just as life for Bret is – and he can’t help but make the same mistakes or replicating the same bad interactions over and over again.
That’s passable for a novel, but less so for a TV show. The Shards compensates for this lack of narrative momentum by introducing several new characters and storylines into bloated episodes that routinely average ~50 minute runtimes. Given Murphy’s interest in true crime and his success with both American Horror Story and various iterations of Monster on Netflix, the obvious adaptation choice is to emphasize and expand the TV-friendly serial killer storyline.
In reality, though, The Shards only does this occasionally. Sure, the series leans into salacious torture sequences and the grisly discovery of bodies (on tennis courts; decapitated heads in the school trophy case). But, just as often, the murders and the mystery are sidelined for long stretches so that completely unrelated storylines can be explored. This includes the lives of Debbie (Hayes Warner)’s parents, such as her closeted gay movie producer father, Terry (Wes Bentley sporting *A WIG*) and coke-addicted wannabe actress mother, Liz (a bored looking Evan Rachel Wood).
Or, in possibly the most misguided decision of the season, The Shards dedicates an ENTIRE episode (episode five, “Murder on the Dancefloor”) to Debbie’s obsession with winning a TV show called Dance Off! including what the show clearly believes is a juicy subplot involving Debbie’s nemesis, Cha Cha (Bella Valdes) having an affair with the program’s married host (Anthony Ramos).
Considering how much the show already struggles with Murphy’s well-documented inability to focus on a single storyline for more than a few moments, the narrative whiplash of following all of the (often extremely dull) subplots quickly becomes a chore after the second episode. Ironically Ellis himself co-authors the first two with Murphy, and perhaps it’s the show runner’s desire to impress the famed author, but those are easily the best episodes of the series (unsurprisingly, they also skew most closely to the book).
The other reason the first two episodes work is because Murphy’s penchant for style over substance hasn’t completely derailed the production yet. By the mid-way point, The Shards has nothing to offer beyond needle drops and montages of characters driving and/or doing coke (SO.MUCH.COKE). Sure, it looks fabulous and glossy, and the 1980s fashion, soundtrack, and visual aesthetic is fun, but its also vapid and dull.*
* One could argue that’s the point considering the characters are all rich, white, entitled and deluded, but The Shards TV show is too self-serious to be campy, too glossy to be enticing, and too repetitive to be interesting. Net result = less than zero.
Not helping things is the cast of late twenty to thirty-somethings who are utterly unconvicing as teenagers (it’s a joke in Hollywood that teens never look like teens, but these fully grown adults look like adults). All of them feature the requisite hot bodies and willingness to go nude or partially nude, but only Kaia Gerber (Cindy Crawford’s daughter) comes out unscathed.
As the author stand-in, Igby Rigney has a compact body and plays a convincing enough closet-case, but the stilted and pretentious affectation he uses for the (frankly egregious amount of) voice-over is insufferable. The only time the performance works is when Rigney allows himself to be ridiculous as Bret teaches Thom (a blank Graham Campbell) how to dance in the aforementioned fifth episode.
As the object of both Bret’s obsession and affection, Homer Gere (son of Richard Gere) is fine. The role demands a certain amount of mystery and heat, which Gere kinda/sorta delivers. That only leaves the final member of the ensemble – Jordan Roth as Terry’s Machiavellian vampy, gay assistant Steven – who hams it up to 11. Perhaps some members of the audience will confuse queer villainy for campy delight, but Steven feels like an impostor from another, completely different show. This is a book character whose role has been substantially beefed up for the TV adaptation by Murphy and the creative team…and not for the better.
Overall, The Shards isn’t fun enough or campy enough or weird enough or salacious enough. It’s pretty packaging standing in for actual substance and no amount of coke or 80s needle drops can save it. Don’t waste your time: American Psycho is right there. 1/5
FX’s The Shards premieres at 6pm PT / 9pm ET on Wednesday, August 5 on Hulu in the US and on Disney+ in Canada
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