Ryan Murphy has a new obsession, and it's dripping with hairspray, secrets, and a body count. The Shards premiered its first two episodes on FX and Hulu on Aug. 5, kicking off a nine-episode season built around privileged 1981 prep school kids, a mysterious new boy, and a serial killer stalking the city.

A closeted narrator, a killer on the loose

The series follows Bret, a fictionalized teenage version of Ellis, narrating his own unraveling as he falls for Robert, an enigmatic transfer student who arrives just as The Trawler, a serial killer targeting teenagers, starts terrorizing the city. Bret is dating a girl named Debbie but sneaking around with male classmates, and nearly every male character in the show is queer in one way or another, including a Hollywood mogul played by Wes Bentley who tries to seduce Bret with promises of a screenwriting career.

Ellis's long-awaited return

The Shards is based on Bret Easton Ellis's 2023 novel of the same name, his first book in thirteen years and, at roughly 590 pages, his longest. The novel began as a serialized audiobook on Ellis's own podcast before landing in print, and critics were split: some called it queasily gripping and gleefully self-aware, while others dismissed it as overindulgent. Ellis, who came out publicly more than a decade ago, wrote a version of himself into the story that many read as a spiritual sequel to Less Than Zero, the novel that first made him famous. He's also writing and executive producing the show.

Almost all of the male characters are queer.

Who's playing who

Igby Rigney stars as Bret, with Kaia Gerber (Cindy Crawford's daughter) and Homer Gere (Richard Gere's son) as privileged classmates Susan and Robert. Wes Bentley, Evan Rachel Wood, Jordan Roth, Graham Campbell, and pop star Hayes Warner round out the cast. Casting two children of '80s heartthrobs alongside a soundtrack stacked with Duran Duran, The Go-Go's, Joan Jett, Fleetwood Mac, and Dionne Warwick isn't subtle, and it isn't meant to be. Troye Sivan and his regular songwriting partner Leland also contribute original music to the season.

MQ's Take

Murphy's whole career has been built on the idea that queerness, camp, and horror can share the same frame, and The Shards fits that pattern. But there's something worth noting beyond the aesthetics: a gay author putting his own closeted adolescence on screen, in a show explicit about the cost of hiding, lands differently than another glossy Murphy anthology. Whether the mystery plot earns its runway over the next eight weeks remains to be seen, but the show is at least willing to sit with the discomfort of being young, queer, and scared of being seen.

Source: Pride

Poster via The Movie Database (TMDB)

bret easton ellis

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