Pictured from left to right: Kaia Gerber as Susan Reynolds, Igby Rigney as Bret, Hayes Warner as Debbie Schaffer, Homer Gere as Robert Mallory, and Graham Campbell as Thom Wright.FX Networks/Disney+/Supplied
Two forces are stalking the snooty, decadent prep-school seniors of 1981 Beverly Hills in the new FX series The Shards: a serial killer dubbed the Trawler, and Bret Easton Ellis’s ego. (The show premieres Aug. 5 on Hulu on Disney+.)
Co-created by Ellis, the author and screenwriter best known for American Psycho, and the prolific Ryan Murphy (Love Story, American Horror Story) – and based on Ellis’s 2023 fictionalized memoir of the same name – The Shards is the latest series to meet this summer’s swelter with a superheated, genre-mashing wink, after the horror/comedy Widow’s Bay and the oversaturated revenge fantasy Cape Fear.
Part thriller, part snarky soap opera, The Shards is both a celebration and a send-up of 1980s too-muchness: Duran Duran and leather pants, camera shots from underneath glass tables of people snorting fat lines of cocaine, house parties with stacks of television sets and baggies full of Klonopin, and teenagers (played by 26-year-olds) who own Porsches, swill martinis in restaurants, smoke Gauloises in school and pack pâté in their lunch pails.
The new FX/Hulu series revolves around five ultraprivileged prom kings and queens set in 1981.FX Networks/Disney+/Supplied
The plot revolves around five such live-fast-die-young, ultraprivileged prom kings and queens, led by Bret (Igby Rigney), a pretty, closeted, aspiring novelist who narrates the show in a voiceover so egregiously spoiled and self-satisfied you want to smack it. I’d call him Ellis’s alter-ego, but he’s more like Ellis’s wish fulfilment.
Then there’s Robert (Homer Gere), the new kid in school. He’s the object of Bret’s lust, jealousy and also suspicion, because his arrival coincides with the Trawler’s killing spree. Thom (Graham Campbell) is the football star, nice but dull; Susan (Kaia Gerber) is the It Girl, stunning, smart, ambitious and Thom’s girlfriend until Robert shows up; and Debbie (Hayes Warner) – one centimetre less stunning than Susan, and therefore forever grasping – is trying not to notice that her boyfriend, Bret, is gay.
They spend their days and nights performing premature world-weariness, skipping school to boss around waiters at restaurants, racing their Mercedes along Mulholland to lavish mansions, having energetic, music-video-lit sex and saying things such as, “Does this lip gloss make me look fat?” and “She could really be a slut – I admire that about her,” and “‘Homecoming’ feels like a word that’s partial to overweight Midwesterners who make floats out of toilet paper and suffer from gout.”
Only Bret, who worships the dual gods of Joan Didion and American Gigolo, seems worried about the Trawler, who kidnaps, tortures and carves up teens – after making them eat things they don’t want to eat, a particular horror in body-obsessed L.A. – and may or may not hail from the hippie cult in the hills, led by a Charles Manson wannabe in a terrible wig.
Kaia Gerber, the daughter of supermodel Cindy Crawford, plays alongside Homer Gere, the son of 'American Gigolo' star Richard Gere.FX Networks/Disney+/Supplied
Murphy, who never met a nail he wasn’t happy to hit on the head, has created a meta-nostalgic fever dream of early-1980s Los Angeles tropes busy with period hair care products, ironic literary references (Kahlil Gibran) and on-the-nose New Wave needle drops (Ultravox, the Cars, Split Enz). From Carrie he borrows William Katt’s blond curls (for Thom); from Grease he steals the character Cha-Cha and the dance contests she wins. He steals from Grease in another way, too, by hiring adults to play high-school students; everyone in the main quintet is 24 or older.
Adding to the flash, Ryan cast a queer icon, Broadway producer Jordan Roth, as Steven, a Hollywood assistant who looks like Andy Warhol swallowed David Bowie; a TikTok star, Ivy Wolk, as Rhonda, a roller-disco princess; and three actors whose presence evokes earlier roles they’re famous for: Wes Bentley from American Beauty, Evan Rachel Wood from Thirteen and Rigney from previous horror movies.
He also creates a nepo-baby-supernova: Gerber, the daughter of supermodel Cindy Crawford, necking with Gere, the son of American Gigolo star Richard Gere. You can’t see those kids together and not see Crawford and the elder Gere, who met at a 1988 barbecue hosted by the celebrity photographer Herb Ritts, married in 1991 and divorced in 1995.
It’s all very tongue-in-chic, but I kept rolling my eyes at how strenuously the series tries to position Ellis as the main character of the entire 1980s. Bret is writing a novel, Less Than Zero, the real novel that catapulted the real Ellis into the eighties-era Literary Brat Pack headed by Jay McInerney. “Bret’s” novel is referred to, many times, as brilliant; a movie version, characters insist, will make $100-million.
Ahem. The highest grossing film of the 1980s, E.T., made just shy of US$800-million. The actual film version of Less Than Zero, released in 1987, made only US$12.4-million, despite its breakout performance by Robert Downey Jr. as a downward-spiralling cokehead and a trailer that growled, “Brace yourself … Some people say it goes too far. Some say it hits too hard. It’s the movie the eighties have been waiting for. But are the eighties ready?” It’s tough to parody something that was already a parody of itself: Less Than Zero the movie received tepid reviews then, and it doesn’t fare any better now.
Wes Bentley from 'American Beauty' plays Terry Schaffer in 'The Shards'.FX Networks/Disney+/Supplied
Ryan has loads of fun sprinkling period references (a scene lifted from Halloween; a Hollywood producer character who lost all his money on Heaven’s Gate) and Ellis-isms across the 10 episodes, particularly the recitation of brand names in an intentionally flat affect – “I was wearing a Ralph Lauren shirt, Calvin Klein jeans and Gucci loafers” – that Ellis popularized in American Psycho.
Less successful are the reaches for something deeper. “Every great story is about loss.” “At 18, I was already staring into my past.” And, “I had never felt more grown-up and I had never felt more alone.” Oh, dear.
As mentioned, Bret reveres Joan Didion, who wrote so hauntingly about the shadow side of sunburnt California, and it’s clear Ellis does, too. “Like all aspiring writers of my generation,” Bret says, “I wanted to write like Didion, with restraint, economy and total control.” Instead, he continues later, “I knew even then what a powerful anaesthetic vulgarity could be. I told myself I was only going to chronicle the decadence, an excuse I would return to many times in my career as a writer.” Including here.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to state that The Shards is offered by FX and premiers Aug. 5 on Hulu on Disney+ in Canada.