The Improbable Marriage of Ryan Murphy and Bret Easton Ellis – Shards

Two men with almost nothing in common built a teen thriller out of a school year that actually happened. It is stranger, and better, than that sounds.

There is a version of this story where it never gets made. Bret Easton Ellis spent years describing his own material as unfilmable in any form that would satisfy him, and for a while that included his own memoir of a Los Angeles high school year gone wrong. Then Ryan Murphy turned up, and something about the pairing that should have curdled instead held together long enough to become a nine episode series on FX, streaming on Hulu in the United States.

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The skepticism arrived before a single frame did. Murphy is the man behind Glee and American Horror Story, a producer whose recent output has leaned so hard into glossy, saturated aestheticization that even people who grew up on his shows have started to keep their distance. Ellis, on the other hand, built a career on flatness. His characters recite brand names like scripture, feel almost nothing, and describe horror in the same tone they use for a lunch order. Handing that voice to a director known for turning every frame into a mood board seemed, on paper, like a bad fit.

What actually happened was closer to a genuine partnership than a hostile takeover. Murphy and Ellis are credited together as creators of the series, and Ellis stayed close to the production as an executive producer rather than handing the book off and walking away. The project had been kicking around in development for years, at one point tied to HBO before it found a home at FX, and by the time cameras rolled the two men had apparently worked out a shorthand that neither side’s fans fully expected.

 

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It helps that Murphy has spent nearly his entire career circling exactly the kind of material Ellis writes. Before he was directing anything, Murphy worked as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times and Entertainment Weekly, and his run of hits since then, from Nip/Tuck through Glee to American Horror Story, has consistently returned to beautiful, damaged people doing terrible things to each other in beautiful settings. Ellis has spent a parallel career doing something similar on the page. The two men were, on some level, always going to end up working the same territory eventually. The surprise was less that they collaborated and more that Ellis, notoriously protective of his own material, agreed to share the creator credit at all rather than staying at arm’s length as a consulting producer, as he had on earlier attempts to bring his work to screen.

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The source material is The Shards, a 608 page novel Ellis published in January 2023 after a thirteen year gap between books, his first since Imperial Bedrooms. It is presented as a memoir narrated by a character named Bret Easton Ellis, a seventeen year old senior at the real Buckley prep school in 1981, and it mixes verifiable details from Ellis’s own adolescence with invented ones until the line between them stops mattering. The book began life even earlier than that, as a 27 part serialized reading Ellis released on his own podcast between September 2020 and September 2021, meaning the story existed in audio form for the better part of a year and a half before it existed as a printed object from Alfred A. Knopf.

The television version keeps the shape of that premise. Set in 1981 Los Angeles, it follows a tight circle of privileged prep school seniors whose final year gets upended by a new arrival named Robert Mallory, whose charm comes with a past nobody can quite verify, while a killer the show calls the Trawler works his way through teenagers across the city. The novel was never written with a sequel in mind, but that has not stopped the producers from talking about more. Executive producer Brad Simpson told Radio Times the team is set up to continue the story through the characters’ senior year if the audience shows up for it.

Ellis has described The Shards as his first novel in more than a decade at the time of its release, and reviewers treated its arrival as a genuine literary event rather than a routine new title from a working novelist. The New York Times Book Review praised its imagery as lush, while NPR called the finished book, at just over 600 pages, one that keeps a reader turning pages despite juggling several intertwined storylines at once: Bret’s writing ambitions, his closeted relationships, his entanglement with his girlfriend’s father, and the Trawler’s crimes running underneath all of it. Not every critic was as enthusiastic. Some reviewers argued the book leaned too heavily on Ellis cataloguing Los Angeles geography and consumer brands, the same tic that made American Psycho a landmark decades earlier but that reads differently in a writer now in his sixties revisiting his own adolescence rather than inventing a fictional stand in.

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The show splits its nine episodes across an uneven release calendar, opening with a two episode premiere on August 5 in the United States and airing on FX with same day Hulu streaming, before rolling out weekly toward a finale that landed on September 9. International audiences got the same episodes a day or so later through Disney+, depending on the territory.

At the center of the circle is Bret, played by Igby Rigney, an aspiring novelist who narrates the series with the kind of self satisfied detachment that has always been Ellis’s signature move. Around him sit Susan, played by Kaia Gerber, whose glossy exterior hides the kind of insecurity that drives most of the series’ tension, and Thom Wright, played by Graham Campbell. Hayes Warner plays Debbie, and Wes Bentley appears as Terry Schaffer, a Hollywood producer character built around the kind of industry casualty who lost everything on a notorious box office flop of the era. The disruption at the center of it all is Robert Mallory, played by Homer Gere, a transfer student whose arrival right before senior year coincides almost too neatly with the city’s growing unease about the Trawler.

Supporting players round out the school and the world around it, including Owen Painter as recurring character Matt Kellner and Daniel Dale as Ryan Vaughn, both of whom told Hollywood Life at the New York premiere that the production leaned on people who actually grew up in Los Angeles during that period to get the texture right. That period accuracy, down to the soundtrack, was treated as a priority. The series pulls from Duran Duran, Fleetwood Mac, and Joan Jett for its period needle drops, while also commissioning new original tracks from Troye Sivan for the first two episodes, an odd but deliberate bridge between the show’s 1981 setting and its present day release.

Keep your enemies closer. The Shards. Watch now on FX | Hulu.

♬ original sound – FX’s The Shards

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Watch enough of the series and it becomes clear where each man’s contribution starts and stops. Murphy directs attention toward surface, color, and spectacle, the kind of opening images that leaned so hard into an electric blue swimming pool that early stills alone were enough to generate accusations of what one reviewer called the Ryanmurphization of the source material. Ellis, meanwhile, supplies the affect. Characters narrate their own outfits with the same flat precision that made American Psycho a landmark, describing a Ralph Lauren shirt, Calvin Klein jeans, and Gucci loafers with no more emotion than a grocery list.

That tension between spectacle and detachment is, according to several critics who have covered the show, the entire point. A review in the Globe and Mail called it part thriller and part snarky soap opera, and noted that Murphy has fun sprinkling in era specific references throughout the ten reported episodes, from a scene visibly borrowed from Halloween to a producer character whose fortune evaporated on the notorious flop Heaven’s Gate. The same review argued the show’s reach for something deeper than nostalgia and camp is less successful than its surface pleasures, a criticism that has followed Murphy’s work for years now regardless of who he is adapting.

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No conversation about this show gets very far without landing on the two names attached to famous parents. Kaia Gerber is the daughter of Cindy Crawford and Rande Gerber, and this is not her first Murphy production, having already appeared in American Horror Story: Double Feature. Homer Gere is the son of Richard Gere and Carey Lowell, making his television debut here as the character whose secrets drive most of the plot. The pairing has generated its own minor subplot in the entertainment press, with outlets tracking whether the two actors’ on screen chemistry extends anywhere near their off screen lives, though as of the show’s premiere both were reportedly linked elsewhere.

The nepo baby conversation has trailed the production since casting was first announced, and the show does not shy away from it. If anything, leaning into a cast full of recognizable surnames and industry adjacent faces fits a story that is explicitly about the corrosive effects of wealth, access, and fame on teenagers who have never known anything else. Whether that was a deliberate irony or simply how casting worked out in an industry town, it has become part of how the series gets discussed online.

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The reviews split roughly down the middle, which is about what a Murphy and Ellis pairing was always going to produce. One review argued the series knows exactly what it is and who it is for, describing it as campy and unserious while still finding room for real observations about youth, vulnerability, and the corrosive impact of fame and access. A more critical take dismissed the result as thin, arguing the show trades in period signifiers and drug fueled 1980s atmosphere without much underneath it, a complaint that echoes long standing criticism of both source and adaptation.

Bret Easton Ellis is famously difficult to bring to screen. Mary Harron’s 2000 adaptation of American Psycho is now considered close to untouchable, but other attempts, including film versions of Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction, landed with mixed reviews and weak box office. The Shards arrives with a built in advantage those earlier adaptations did not have: its own author sitting in the writers’ room and the executive producer credits, rather than watching from a distance as someone else reshapes his work. Whether that proximity improved the result or simply changed which compromises got made is still being argued over in real time, episode by episode, as the season heads toward its finale.

What is not really in dispute is that the show found an audience willing to have that argument. A series built around two creators whose sensible were supposed to be incompatible has instead become one of the more talked about FX debuts of the year, driven as much by its casting and soundtrack choices as by the mystery at its center. The book took Ellis more than a decade to write and years more to serialize before it reached print. The show that grew out of it took its own long road through development before landing at FX with both men’s names on the créator credit, an outcome almost nobody was predicting when the project was first announced.