Ryan Murphy and Bret Easton Ellis have been circling each other’s orbit for decades without ever actually working together, which makes “The Shards” feel less like a new project than an overdue one. FX and Hulu’s nine-episode adaptation of Ellis’s 2023 novel premiered August 5, and it arrives exactly as advertised: gorgeous, indulgent, occasionally unsettling, and never quite as smart as it thinks it is.
The premise pairs two men whose careers have circled the same obsessions for thirty years. Ellis made his name writing about beautiful, empty people doing terrible things in “Less Than Zero” and “American Psycho.” Murphy built an empire doing something similar on television, mining glossy true-crime and pop-culture excess for prestige drama. On paper, as one critic at Josh at the Movies put it, the pairing looks like a perfect fit. In practice, the show that results is harder to pin down.
A Killer Prowling Beverly Hills
“The Shards” is set in 1981, in the exclusive, sun-bleached world of L.A.’s Buckley prep school, where a teenage Bret Easton Ellis — played by Igby Rigney — is finishing his senior year alongside a tight circle of wealthy, glamorous friends. Their world is disrupted twice over: first by the arrival of a mysterious transfer student named Robert Mallory, played by Homer Gere, and second by a killer stalking the city known as the Trawler.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the Trawler is positioned within the show’s fictional world as a contemporary of real Los Angeles killers active in that era — a peer, narratively speaking, to the Night Stalker and the Hillside Strangler — someone who taunts his victims before killing them. As the Trawler’s crimes edge closer to Bret’s friend group, Bret becomes convinced that Robert and the killer are somehow connected, even as everyone around him is too distracted by parties, drugs and status games to notice.
That central mystery gives the show its engine, but multiple critics have noted it isn’t really where the show’s energy lives. The Trawler functions more as an atmospheric threat than a coherent villain for much of the run.
Where the Show Actually Shines
Nearly every review of “The Shards” agrees on one thing: it looks incredible. Metacritic’s roundup of 22 critic reviews lands the show at a “mixed or average” 57, but even reviews that are otherwise unconvinced tend to praise the production values — the show is, in the aggregate assessment quoted there, beautifully curated, shot and scored.
That’s echoed across the board. Time points to the stylish production design and Murphy’s knack for elaborate set pieces and genre pastiche as real strengths, even while questioning whether the show earns its bigger ambitions. Josh at the Movies goes further, praising the immersive soundtrack and a voiceover technique that lifts narration directly from Ellis’s original prose — a device that ties the adaptation back to its source material more directly than most page-to-screen translations attempt.
The 1981 setting gets a similar level of care. Needle drops, production design and costuming all lean hard into a very specific moment in Los Angeles history, to the point that TV Guide observes the show never lets you forget what decade you’re in — meant partly as praise for the immersion and partly as a gentle jab at how insistently the show reminds you.
The Cast Carries More Than the Script
If there’s a consensus pick for the show’s MVP, it’s Homer Gere as Robert Mallory. TV Guide singles him out as the one performer whose tone actually matches the dark, wry register the show seems to be reaching for throughout — an outsider with a permanent, knowing half-smile, as though he’s in on a joke nobody else has caught up to yet. When Bret mentions he’s working on a screenplay, Robert’s dry reply — that it’s a relief someone is finally doing something productive — is held up as one of the show’s sharper moments of self-awareness.
The rest of the ensemble includes Kaia Gerber as queen-bee Susan Reynolds, Hayes Warner as Debbie Schaffer, and Graham Campbell as Thom Wright, rounding out the privileged friend group at the center of the story. The Hollywood Reporter highlights a scene built around a Halloween party planned in defiance of a citywide curfew — Debbie insisting on throwing it anyway, Susan pitching a theme that’s essentially Studio 54 relocated to outer space — as a fairly representative slice of the show’s tone: glossy, a little self-mocking, fully aware of its own excess.
Where It Falls Apart
The praise for craft and performance comes with a consistent asterisk: critics are far less sold on how the show handles its own central tension. IndieWire argues the series works best when it stays inside the relatable friction of teenage jealousy, romance and betrayal, and struggles considerably more whenever it shifts focus to the Trawler himself — a killer described there as too ethereal a presence to generate real dread, despite a body count that includes the victims’ pets alongside the victims themselves.
Time’s review frames the issue slightly differently, suggesting that beneath the show’s stylish surface, there’s clearly a bigger ambition Murphy and Ellis are reaching for — some larger statement about fame, violence and the specific psychology of watching beautiful young people self-destruct — that the show gestures toward more than it actually achieves.
IndieWire’s review is more blunt about the split verdict, titling its piece around the idea that the adaptation simply never comes together, even while conceding it’s rarely boring to watch. That tension — a show that’s constantly interesting in the moment but hard to defend as a coherent whole — runs through nearly every notice the series has received.
A Familiar Coming-of-Age Story, With a Body Count
Strip away the murders, and IndieWire notes “The Shards” is structurally a familiar senior-year story: first loves, friend-group betrayals, and a protagonist’s slow realization that the adult world he thought he understood is stranger and darker than expected. What separates it from a standard coming-of-age drama is the layer bolted on top — the abductions, the taunting killer, and Bret’s growing paranoia that his own life is being narrated by someone else’s violence.
Bret’s sexuality adds another layer critics have picked up on. He’s gay but not openly so within the world of the show, and several reviews note that tension — between what Bret performs for his friends and what he’s actually feeling, particularly toward Robert — as one of the more effective throughlines connecting the show’s teen-drama half to its thriller half. Both Murphy and Ellis, Time points out, came of age as gay men in the same era the show is set in, which gives that specific thread more grounding than some of the show’s other big swings.
A Long Road to the Screen
“The Shards” has been in development for years before it ever reached FX. Ellis originally conceived the story as a serialized audio project, reading chapters aloud on his own podcast starting in late 2020 before the novel was published by Knopf in 2023. According to the novel’s official description, the book blends Ellis’s own teenage years at Buckley with a wholly invented serial killer plot, presenting itself as a kind of “semi-autobiographical” thriller — a framing the show has kept largely intact.
FX’s series adaptation was first announced years before it premiered, with Murphy and Gerber attached early on and director Max Winkler initially set to direct. By the time the show reached FX and Hulu this August, the creative team had shifted, with Murphy taking on a more central role as co-creator alongside Ellis himself. That long gestation period shows up in the finished product in small ways — a script that feels heavily workshopped, scene by scene, even if the overall shape of the season doesn’t always cohere.
It’s also worth noting that “The Shards” fits into a specific lane both creators have mined before. Ellis is still best known for “American Psycho,” his 1991 novel about a Wall Street serial killer that became a landmark 2000 film. Murphy, meanwhile, has built entire anthology franchises — “American Horror Story,” “American Crime Story,” “Monster” — around true and fictionalized killers alike. “The Shards” isn’t a radical departure for either man so much as a natural meeting point of two overlapping obsessions that, until now, had simply never been credited to the same project.
The Bottom Line
“The Shards” isn’t a show critics are unanimously dismissing, and it isn’t one they’re rushing to call great, either. The Hollywood Reporter’s verdict — nostalgic, over-the-top and unsurprisingly uneven — captures where most reviews have landed: a series that delivers exactly the kind of maximalist, provocative television both creators are known for, without fully justifying the weight it wants its central mystery to carry.
For viewers drawn in by the pairing of Murphy’s visual excess and Ellis’s fascination with beautiful, damaged people, there’s enough style and atmosphere here to make the nine-episode run worth the watch. Just don’t expect the Trawler subplot to be the reason it stays with you.
“The Shards” is now streaming its first two episodes on FX and Hulu, with new episodes rolling out weekly.
