“K ids today have it fuckin’ easy,” says Bret AKA Bret Easton Ellis, the controversial author of American Psycho and The Rules Of Attraction. Published in 2023, The Shards is his meta-memoir, now metamorphosed into a deliciously lurid new show – a highly fictionalised look at his senior high school year. Sure, Gen Alpha have to reckon with Trump, climate change and unemployment but 1981 Los Angeles was the era of the serial killer.
With Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez and John Wayne Gacy all stalking the land, the innocence of the American childhood has ebbed away with every new bodybag. Here, set to tunes such as The Stranglers’ ‘Golden Brown’, Duran Duran’s ‘Planet Earth’ and ‘Vienna’ by Ultravox, The City Of Angels’ sunny climes can’t mask the fact that darkness and death lurk in parking lots and alleyways. Or in one case, a tennis court, as a luckless female victim finds out when she is strung up against the net.
Stylish, sexy and sick – exactly as Easton Ellis would like it – The Shards is created by one-man TV machine Ryan Murphy (Glee, American Horror Story), who directs the opening episode and sets the tone for what’s to come. Murphy is perfectly suited for a show which, if the title hadn’t been used, could easily be called “The Bold And The Beautiful”. When its glam-squad cast of high-schoolers aren’t hanging out at the mall shopping for vinyl, they’re blowing their allowance on drugs.
With Bret played by rising star Igby Rigney (who last year, oddly enough, featured in true-crime series Devil In Disguise: John Wayne Gacy), the set-up for this 10-episode series sees him ogle a mysterious newcomer at a screening of The Shining. A year later, he discovers this handsome young fellow is Robert Mallory (Homer Gere), a new attendee at the elite Hollywood high school where they all pretend to carve themselves out an education.
While Bret is content dating fellow student Debbie (Hayes Warner) and hanging with friends Thom (Graham Campbell) and Susan (Kaia Gerber), the presence of Robert unsettles him, particularly when the newcomer refuses to acknowledge that they saw each other a year earlier. Who exactly is he – just another popularity-seeking rival at school or is there something more sinister about him?
While the show doesn’t over-egg the fact that Bret is supposed to be Easton Ellis himself – aside from a brief mention of Less Than Zero, the debut novel he would publish in 1985 – the idea that the author of American Psycho should grow up in a land filled with them is tantalising. Playing with notions of paranoia, we’re left wondering if Robert could be connected to the murderous spree that’s left the city paralysed with fear.
Blessed with spot-on eighties production design (Debbie’s landline phone, shaped like a pair of lips, is a particular highlight), the show’s only misstep is casting Cindy Crawford’s 24-year-old daughter Kaia Gerber as a high-schooler. Although you suspect her selection opposite Richard Gere’s son Homer was deliberate, a nod to the fact that Crawford and Gere were once married. In LA, it seems, there are almost as many nepo babies as maniac killers.
‘The Shards’ is available to watch on Disney+ now
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