The Shards Has One Unfilmable Trick
The Shards premieres this Wednesday, August 5, at 9 PM ET on FX, with the first two episodes streaming on Hulu the same night. The pitch alone is strange company: Ryan Murphy, television's great maximalist, co-created it with Bret Easton Ellis, adapting Ellis's 2023 semi-autobiographical novel about a fictionalized 17-year-old Bret at Buckley, an elite Los Angeles prep school, in 1981, while a serial killer called the Trawler closes in on his circle of friends. Igby Rigney plays young Bret. Kaia Gerber is Susan Reynolds, Homer Gere is the magnetic new arrival Robert Mallory, and Wes Bentley and Evan Rachel Wood play Terry and Liz Schaffer, the adults in a story where the adults notice nothing.
The novel is the strangest thing Ellis has written, and its strangeness is structural. His first book in 13 years began as an audiobook, serialized in 27 installments on his Patreon podcast, presented as something that happened. On the page it stayed autofiction: the narrator is named Bret Easton Ellis, and the horror starts when Robert Mallory transfers in and Bret becomes convinced, on evidence only he seems able to see, that Mallory is connected to the Trawler. The book never steps outside Bret's head to check. Across 608 pages the ambiguity curdles into something worse: you begin to wonder whether the Trawler was ever what Bret said it was, and whether the person you should have been watching was the one telling the story.
That is the trick I don't think television can do. Film is a witness. It shows you a crime scene or it withholds one, and either choice answers the question the novel spends its whole length refusing to answer. Murphy's instincts run the other way entirely, toward spectacle, toward showing you the knife. Which makes Ellis co-creating the show the one genuinely interesting variable: either he is the guardrail keeping the series locked inside its narrator's unreliable skull, or he watched Murphy take the wheel and signed the surrender. FX is selling a high school horror-thriller, and it may be a very good one. But see it second. Read the book first, while the images are still yours, because after Wednesday the show starts deciding what really happened.
If 608 pages before Wednesday sounds ambitious, start anyway and let the season trail you. And if The Shards becomes your first Ellis, the shelf behind it is short and sharp. American Psycho is the essential next read, his most notorious unreliable mind, and the 2000 film is proof an Ellis adaptation can work by becoming its own thing instead of a transcription. Less Than Zero, the 1987 film of his debut, is the cautionary opposite, a movie that kept the names and lost the voice. That is the whole bet FX is making this week: adapt Ellis and you either find his frequency or you flatten it.
