Sex, drugs and serial killers: inside Ryan Murphy and Bret Easton Ellis’s lurid TV thriller

The Shards brings the cocaine-addled teens of a 1980s prep school to life with a cast of newcomers and a heavy dose of sleaze

One of the first things Ryan Murphy’s TV adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s The Shards will make you ask is: where the hell are these kids’ parents? The answer is simple. This is Los Angeles in 1981, and these fabulously benumbed kids aren’t being helicopter-parented. They’re going to parties, drinking whiskey, listening to Ultravox’s Vienna on repeat and doing copious amounts of cocaine. It’s a complete vision of Ellis’s dully hedonistic America.

The FX series follows a character named Bret Ellis – a thinly-coded version of the author – in senior year at an exclusive Los Angeles prep school whose controlled, Joan Didion-coded world begins to unravel with the arrival of enigmatic transfer student Robert Mallory. At the same time, in the post-Charles Manson and Jeffrey Dahmer era, a serial killer known as The Trawler draws ever closer to Ellis and his increasingly paranoid circle of friends. Ellis (the real one) first released his autofictional story The Shards as a serialized podcast between 2020 and 2021 before expanding it into a novel in 2023.