The Shards Review: Ryan Murphy's New Serial Killer Show Is a Watchable, Frustrating Ode to the '80s

It's surprising that it took so long for Ryan Murphy and Bret Easton Ellis to collaborate. Hollywood's supreme ruler of trash-tige television and the author of such high-meets-low-brow novels as Less Than Zero and American Psycho have long held overlapping fields of interest. They love to tell stories about people who are both wealthy and depraved. They are fascinated by murders that unfold in the glossiest of settings. And they each have a gift for simultaneously mocking and glorifying people with high-class problems.

The Shards, a new drama that debuts Aug. 5 on FX and Hulu, finally enables their respective Venn diagrams to fully overlap, with extremely mixed results. In the nine-episode first season, based on the semi-autobiographical 2023 novel by Ellis, who co-created the series with Murphy, the pair introduces us to a clique of freakishly wealthy and sophisticated L.A. high school students navigating their senior year in 1981 while a murderer is offing their peers.

"Kids today have it so easy," says Bret (Igby Rigney, an alum of Mike Flanagan's Netflix thrillers), in an impossibly smug-sounding voiceover narration that is, unfortunately, a recurring element in The Shards. "Our generation had it tougher," he continues to explain in the first episode. "Because we had to deal with serial killers."

6.0

The Shards

at FX and Hulu

Like

• The 1981 setting
• Attractive cast
• Borderline campy vibe make this very watchable

Dislike

• The tone is unfocused
• Characters don't feel like real people

This is a patently ridiculous line, especially since it's uttered during a sequence where Bret steers his vehicle through the winding, upscale streets of Los Angeles while complaining that he's forced to drive an "old" Mercedes. But it's unclear whether Ellis and Murphy, who co-wrote the pilot, which Murphy directed, want us to laugh or take what Bret says seriously. It's a tonal puzzle that The Shards never fully solves, which is too bad, because when it leans more toward wink-wink comedy that acknowledges the characters' narcissism, it's kinda fun. But the more it asks us to genuinely empathize with these impossibly privileged nepo babies, the more the series feels like a social experiment attempting to determine whether audiences can relate to a story where the heroes are basically all Steff from Pretty in Pink. Or, more apropos: versions of the kids in Less Than Zero.

The casting of these kids here has been cannily executed, particularly in the case of two of the main characters: the practically perfect in every way Susan Reynolds, portrayed by Kaia Gerber, and the mysterious new guy, Robert Mallory, brought to smoldering, smirking life by Homer Gere. Yes, the latter is the son of Richard Gere and the former is the daughter of Cindy Crawford, both of whom became prominent celebrities in the '80s, and were married for nearly half a decade before divorcing in 1995. It is challenging to watch them as Susan and Robert, who become attracted to one another despite Susan's relationship with her football player boyfriend Thom (Graham Campbell), and not think about their famous parents. This is especially true for Gerber, who looks so much like her mother that it's easy to trick the brain into thinking we're watching the former host of MTV's House of Style, particularly given the retro nature of the setting. To the extent that it's possible for looking too much like Cindy Crawford to be a burden, it is one that Kaia has to contend with, even though she's reasonably convincing as the girl who naturally wins at everything without even trying.

Gere, on the other hand, is the one actor in the cast whose performance matches the dark/wry tone that The Shards should have more consistently maintained. He's an outsider who shows up at the private prep school as a senior, having reportedly been institutionalized for mental health issues, which prompts Bret to suspect Robert might be the serial killer known as the Trawler. Gere is terrific at being slippery; he always has a tiny, sly grin on his face, as if he's laughing at a joke that the people around him are way too slow to get. When Bret tells Robert that he's working on a script, Robert replies, "You're writing a screenplay. Well, that's a relief. Someone has to." He gets that Bret is kind of a joke, even when it's not clear whether The Shards believes it.

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Bret, who is gay but deeply in the closet, also is drawn to Robert and resentful that he doesn't remember seeing Bret in passing at a screening of The Shining. Via this relationship and other storylines, this Ellis adaptation wants to make connections between the soon-to-erupt AIDS epidemic and the specter of death that hangs over these sexually active teens, a theme that Murphy has explored before. But it never persuasively draws the line between those two dots. Rigney, who resembles a looksmaxxed version of Topher Grace, appropriately gives Bret an air of affected pretentiousness, but that vibe also makes it hard to care about what happens to him.

Of course all of these actors look too old to be high schoolers, but that's also the point of The Shards: These are children acting like mini-adults, with parents who are somehow less attentive than the grown-ups in Peanuts. They smoke more cigarettes than Don Draper. They drink cocktails nightly, and often daily, too. Along with seemingly everyone else in the greater Los Angeles area, they also snort an obscene amount of cocaine. At one point Susan tells her best friend Debbie (Hayes Warner, a singer and actress who somehow looks more like Jennie Garth than Jennie Garth): "Debbie, you can't just do coke out in the open at Hamburger Hamlet." This moment will probably become a meme and, frankly, it deserves to.

If there is one point that The Shards very persuasively makes, it is that the year in which it takes place is 1981. The show reminds us of this constantly and with zero attempt at subtlety, which makes sense. After all, this is a very Ryan Murphy television program, which means the sex is mildly gratuitous, the violence is more so, and restraint has gone entirely MIA. The soundtrack features one solid 1981 needle drop after another — "Planet Earth" by Duran Duran! "We Got the Beat" by The Go-Go's! "Vienna" by Ultravox! — and the culture of the time is acknowledged with references to famous Maxell commercials, Giorgio perfume, Bain de Soleil tanning lotion, and the birth of MTV. Wes Bentley, who plays Debbie's sleazy and neglectful movie producer dad, has a head of curly hair that definitely would have made John Oates jealous. The production and costume design is aggressively accurate.

All of that makes The Shards very watchable even though, while watching it, you will regularly acknowledge its shortcomings. It's hard not to laugh at a show that opens each episode with the standard disclaimer that "any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental," then spends the next hour talking about a guy named Bret who has just written a novel called Less Than Zero. Perhaps this is intentional, a commentary on Bret's status as an unreliable narrator and the dishonesty of thesee characters in general. But I can't be sure if The Shards is self-aware enough to make the joke. I watched all nine episodes and I'm still not sure.

Premieres: Wednesday, Aug. 5 at 9/8c on FX and Hulu with two episodes, followed by a new episode each Wednesday
Who's in it: Igby Rigney, Homer Gere, Graham Campbell, Hayes Warner, Wes Bentley, and Kaia Gerber
Who's behind it: Ryan Murphy and Bret Easton Ellis (creators)
For fans of: Less Than Zero, Ryan Murphy's Ryan Murphiness, prime Cindy Crawford
Episodes watched: 9 of 9