Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Chris Revelle | TV | September 10, 2026
The Shards fumbled its way across the first season finish line on Wednesday and, as with the finale of Love Story, I’m left wondering what the point of making it was if Murphy was so manifestly uninterested in the material. The failures of The Shards are even greater when one considers how suited for a Bret Easton Ellis adaptation Murphy really is. It’s not so much that The Shards series wasn’t faithful to the original Ellis novel that shares the title (though it wasn’t), it’s that the changes made and digressions added threw viewers so far away from the original story that it’s barely an adaptation. So how did a season of fluff, nonsense, and dance contests wrap up?
The finale is a briefly coherent mess in which scenes happen with paltry little to connect them. The gist is: no one knows who the serial killer known as the Trawler is, so people take turns being accused. Debbie sees the tape of Bret having sex with her father, Terry, and immediately uses it to blackmail Terry into giving her a celebrity career. She later finds her horse mutilated in bed because the most interesting thing the show can imagine doing is recreating other, better works. Susan and Thom have yet another fight, but this time she accuses him of being the Trawler and then out of nowhere he asks her to marry him. Look, I’m just the reviewer.
Later, the Trawler attacks Susan in her home, and Thom comes to rescue her. He tells her a very suspicious story about fighting the Trawler off. This could’ve been a clue in an interesting mystery, but it’s a Ryan Murphy production so it doesn’t mean anything. The cast is having a Halloween party because it says so in the script. Bret accuses Robert of being the Trawler for the zillionth time, but, in the show’s one single moment of genuinely interesting plotting, Robert reveals that Bret’s parents haven’t been seen in ages, implying that Bret is the Trawler. Did Bret kill them? Is he the Trawler? Maybe! But that brief flash of something dies when eventually the police come to gather the main cast together in one room to bloviate about how the killer is one of them. Just before the finale ends, Bret comes in on voiceover to say, “And that’s when things really got crazy.”
It’s sort of unbelievable that Murphy couldn’t get it together for an Ellis adaptation. Both creators are enfant terrible types with a pronounced taste for spectacle, satire, and taboo, which is often realized in the form of a racy soap opera starring young adults or teens. Whatever the disconnect, Murphy’s allergy to coherent storytelling with motivated characters is the most glaring reason The Shards was a misfire.
There’s also the issue of the series’ strange chasteness. All of the teen characters are aged up to 18, to make Bret’s fling with Terry less objectionable. The camera also seems squeamish in how it avoids sexual scenes that go beyond a kiss or two. It’s an odd turn for Murphy, but even odder for an Ellis adaptation. Ellis’ books are wall-to-wall sleaze, smut, and provocation, things Murphy usually excels at, but when it’s served up on a silver platter, Murphy retreats. Beyond wondering why Murphy would make The Shards if he wasn’t going to try, I wonder why he bothered if he was going to shrink away from the elements that make Ellis’ work memorable.
There’s not yet any word on whether there’ll be a second season, but there wouldn’t be a point. The Shards was a really lousy season of television, but who knows? Murphy’s work gets renewed no matter how meager it is.
