Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Lindsay Traves | TV | August 5, 2026
I don’t usually come in with a “my personal experience” opening paragraph but I feel compelled to cop to Bret Easton Ellis being my “problematic fave.” You can’t tell me nothin’ when it comes to his “all kind of the same” novels, and I’ll happily regale anyone who asks (or doesn’t) with why American Psycho actually had all the right source material to work with to make that brilliant movie. Ellis’s work has been adapted beyond that iconic dark tale. The Rules of Attraction (flawless), Less Than Zero, and The Informers all boast being adaptations of the author’s works. American Psycho, I think anyway, is partly the most lauded because of its exceptional balance of the darkness and the light. Patrick Bateman, one of Ellis’ signature personal insert narrators, speaks in pure darkness while sparkling in the daylight. It’s what props up the story of a person hiding in plain sight. It’s what tells the story of a person maintaining a façade while losing it. In a lot of ways, The Shards (the book) is the successor to that, it being about Ellis — who places himself in a fictionalized version of his real high school experience — slowly losing it to the darkness while experiencing the glossy life of a rich kid at in LA. The TV adaptation struggles to work with that, it ending up a vapid and hollow portrait of hot young people and a slasher killer. What else should we expect from Ryan Murphy?
Okay now that I’ve more than adequately glazed this mid novel, it’s time to discuss the show. Like the book, the show follows Bret Ellis (Igby Rigney) in his debaucherous days as a high schooler in 1980s Beverly Hills. He and his close knit group of friends move swiftly through adult parties, sipping hard liquor and doing cocaine, getting straight As, running for homecoming court, and managing the fear of a local serial killer torturing teen girls. The killer doesn’t upend things as much as the arrival of Robert Mallory (Homer Gere), a mysterious and gorgeous transfer student who lives just outside their usual zone. Bret is attracted to Robert, but he’s more suspicious of him and his desire to expose Robert as sinister is pitted against his desire to not be exposed as gay. Bret is struggling with his identity, maintaining secret sexual relationships with men and a public one with the second most popular girl in school, Debbie Schaffer (Hayes Warner). Things get messier when Robert starts to target Bret’s attached best friend, Susan (Kaia Gerber), and their classmates start to go missing.
The Shards is a semi-autobiographical story about sexy partying teens taking on senior year, and oh, there’s a killer around. It’s a story of a guy’s paranoia consuming him while the shallow elements of his friends’ lives consume them. The TV adaptation removes any of those layers to highlight the vapid parts, and that’s really it. Where the book’s narrator is knowingly written to be telling a vapid story juxtaposed with something as startling as a serial killer, the TV show is just vapid. Murphy, a purveyor of casual misogyny, adds in new scenes like ones that seem only to get a gorgeous actress in a corset, to make her do sex work so we can watch her be humiliated by it. Ellis is credited as co-creator and is listed as co-writer on the first two episodes, but something is absolutely lost to Murphy and the remaining writing team.
The show is glossy and glitzy, as it should be. Everyone is always crisply dressed with not a hair out of place or an accessory left behind. Costumes and craft must have had a blast dressing the students and their 1980s manors. But the glitz becomes the only tone, not paired with the horrific underbelly (think Dexter. Sparkly sunny Miami with pitch black narration. Think MaXXXine. A bloody affair of a psycho splashed with glittery 80s pastiche. That’s what’s missing). The terror of the killer falls by the wayside, and as does Bret’s descent. Instead, cocaine showers are interrupted by bloody horse heads, and the true sleaze of the 80s Hollywood system is reduced to dropping a couple names. I’d spent time wanting for it to be as messy as The Idol so it could at least be interesting.
“Faithful adaptation” isn’t the metric here, but it is worth going back to as a means of understanding where the show falters. The Shards is a vapid story about teens, drugs, sex, and violence that tries to stay afloat with wooden acting, dry narration, and an entire episode about a dance competition.
The Shards premieres Wednesday, August 5 2026 on Hulu in the US and Disney+ in Canada, episodes dropping week to week
