An episode of Ryan Murphy’s The Shards departs from Bret Easton Ellis’s original story to recreate an exuberant 1980s teen television dance contest, before turning it into a murder mystery. The sequence matters because it combines deliberately awkward period dancing with the show’s darker dramatic twist, giving the cast an unusually performance-heavy, near self-contained episode.

The fictional competition draws on Dance Party USA, which aired from 1986 to 1992, and features a “Super Freak” routine alongside other 1980s hits. Derek Hough and Tessandra Chavez trained the ensemble and choreographed the dances; Chavez also worked with Homer Gere on an earlier solo filmed repeatedly overnight across five nights. Kaia Gerber’s character wins the contest, provoking jealousy from her best friend before an on-set fight and murder eclipse the result.