The Shards

Ryan Murphy and Bret Easton Ellis adapt Ellis's 2023 novel into an FX series streaming on Hulu, and it's exactly the collision you'd expect. It's 1981, Los Angeles. A fictionalized teen version of Ellis himself (Igby Rigney) is a senior at an obscenely wealthy prep school when a new kid, Robert Mallory (Homer Gere), transfers in. Around the same time, a serial killer called the Trawler starts working the city. Bret becomes convinced these two facts are related. His friend group — Kaia Gerber, Hayes Warner, Graham Campbell — orbits the paranoia while trying to stay hot and bored. Wes Bentley and Evan Rachel Wood play parents.

Igby Rigney is the reason this thing holds together. He plays Bret as a jittery, closeted, unreliable narrator who's clearly telling you a story he's already lost the plot of, and the show lets that instability sit in his face for long stretches. Homer Gere (yes, Richard's kid) is genuinely unnerving in the Mallory role, all blank charm. The production design earns its money — cars, wood-panelled dens, Quaaludes, mall food courts, a needle drop economy so dense it almost becomes the score. Murphy pulls back on his campiest instincts here, and Ellis's fingerprints on the dialogue are all over the mid-episode monologues, which are the best writing in the show.

It's bloated. A novel that ran on interior dread gets stretched into a series that keeps taking exits it doesn't need. Storylines pile up and then just sit there. The Trawler procedural half never quite fuses with the coming-of-age half, so you get long patches where the show forgets which one it is. And this is a Ryan Murphy joint, which means the third and fourth acts of any given episode will find something baroque and stupid to do. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 52, Metacritic at 57, and the split is real. If you found Ellis's prose exhausting, the show doesn't fix that; it upholsters it.

This is for people who liked American Crime Story or the "Versace" season of that show, or who read Less Than Zero and wanted more of it. Fans of Euphoria's aesthetic maximalism will find something to sink into here, minus the smartphones. If you need a serial killer show that actually moves — Mindhunter, True Detective S1 — you'll be furious by episode three. Anyone who hates voiceover should not press play. Anyone allergic to nepo casting will have a rough time; the show is thick with famous-parent kids, and it more or less knows it.

WORTH IT because the craft is there in the parts that matter — a lead performance you'll remember, a look and sound that commit to 1981 without cosplay, and a mood of low-grade doom that Ellis and Murphy both know how to build. It's not great. It's a good, uneven, sometimes stunning show that a tougher editor could've made into something better. On the Lecture Test it passes cleanly; nobody's giving speeches, and the moral queasiness stays inside the story instead of getting handed to you on a card. Watch it for Rigney and the vibes. Skip an episode if you need to.