‘The Shards’ Review: Ryan Murphy and Bret Easton Ellis Team Up for FX’s Predictably Excess-Soaked Tale of Prep-School Sex, Drugs and Murder
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FX and Hulu have launched The Shards, a nine-episode drama created by Ryan Murphy and Bret Easton Ellis, adapting Ellis's acclaimed 600-page autofiction novel about his privileged upbringing in early-1980s Los Angeles. According to Hollywood Reporter critic Daniel Fienberg, the series leans fully into the "excess" audiences expect from the pairing, delivering opulence, a heavy soundtrack and provocative sexuality, though it struggles to unify its tones and characters into a coherent whole.
Set around Halloween 1981, the story follows a group of wealthy Buckley School teenagers, including a fictionalised Bret Ellis (Igby Rigney), against the backdrop of a serial killer targeting affluent youths and a city-wide curfew. The cast includes Kaia Gerber, Homer Gere, Hayes Warner, Evan Rachel Wood and Wes Bentley. The review notes the show reaches no clear resolution by its finale, relies more on stylised soundstages than authentic locations, and eventually veers into territory the critic calls "perhaps worse but more entertaining." The Shards premieres 5 August at 9pm on FX and Hulu.
- FX/Hulu's The Shards adapts Bret Easton Ellis's novel with Ryan Murphy
- Nine-episode drama set among wealthy 1981 LA teens amid a killer's spree
- Critic calls it excess-filled, uneven, but unexpectedly entertaining
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The Shards is a nine-part FX and Hulu drama created by television producer Ryan Murphy and novelist Bret Easton Ellis, based on Ellis's own 600-page novel of the same name. The book is described as "autofiction", meaning it blends real elements of Ellis's own teenage years in early-1980s Los Angeles with invented, fictionalised events, and the TV version follows the same approach.
The story centres on a group of wealthy teenagers at the fictional Buckley School in 1981, including a young version of Ellis himself, played by Igby Rigney. Their lives unfold against a backdrop of a serial killer targeting affluent young people and a curfew imposed across the city, with a cast that includes Kaia Gerber, Homer Gere, Hayes Warner, Evan Rachel Wood and Wes Bentley.
The pairing of Murphy and Ellis matters because both are known for provocative, stylised work exploring wealth, excess and dark subject matter, Murphy through television series such as American Horror Story, and Ellis through novels including American Psycho and Less Than Zero. Their collaboration on this adaptation has drawn attention as a coming-together of two prominent, similarly themed voices in American pop culture.
Both sides, in good faith
The strongest fair case each way — we don't pick a winner.
The case for
Admirers of the Murphy-Ellis pairing would argue that the show's opulence, heavy soundtrack and provocative content are faithful to the tone of Ellis's autofiction, which has always used excess and moral vacancy to satirise privileged Los Angeles youth; stylised soundstages and an unresolved finale can be read as deliberate choices reflecting the disorientation and artifice at the story's core rather than as failures of craft. From this view, judging the series by conventional standards of tidy plotting misses the point of adapting a writer whose work is prized precisely for its unsettling, unresolved excess.
The case against
Sceptics would counter that leaning fully into shock value and opulence without unifying the characters or tone amounts to style substituting for substance, leaving audiences with provocation rather than insight. A critic sympathetic to this view would note that a nine-episode series reaching no clear resolution and relying on stylised sets over authentic locations risks feeling indulgent rather than purposeful, suggesting the adaptation prioritises the pairing's brand of excess over the discipline needed to make that excess meaningful.
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