It’s the Summer of 1981, and young Bret Easton Ellis (Igby Rigney) has nothing to worry about. He’s a rich kid with zero parental supervision, one of the most popular kids at Los Angeles’ elite Buckley prep school alongside the golden couple of sweet but dim jock Thom (Graham Campbell) and picture-perfect Susan (Kaia Gerber.) He’s also dating the gorgeous Debbie Schaffer (Hayes Warner), even if he’d rather be sleeping with guys. His peace is destroyed by the arrival of a mysterious new student, Robert Mallory (Homer Gere.) He’s handsome, charming and wins over everyone. Except Bret. He can’t shake the sense that this guy is not all that he seems. And what of The Trawler, an active serial killer who targets young people and brutalizes their corpses? Surely it can’t all be a coincidence?
It’s easy to imagine what drew Ryan Murphy to “The Shards,” the doorstop of a novel by “American Psycho” author Bret Easton Ellis. Both men are self-styled provocateurs who revel in the lurid, punctuated with moments of ultraviolence and high camp. The sprawling Murphyverse of TV is one defined by slick styling and a distinct contempt for its characters, which doesn’t feel out of place in Ellis’s stories of apathetic brats sinking into degradation simply because they can. Really, “Less Than Zero,” Ellis’s debut novel, about a disaffected college student watching his friends’ lives fall apart in disturbing decadence, feels right up Murphy’s alley. But instead, he’s gone with “The Shards,” a far trickier book that is part paranoid serial killer thriller, part meta-faux memoir about Ellis’s entire life and back catalogue.
I wondered if it might be unadaptable. After watching “The Shards,” that feeling was confirmed.
Murphy is not entirely out of step with Ellis’s vision of sex, drugs and privilege. The show doubles down on glossy shots of cocaine being snorted from tables, sexy teens in bikinis waltzing around mansions, and expensive cars blasting recognizable ‘80s hits from the stereo. It’s a veritable checklist of 1981 cliches, which in fairness, the book also does (take a drink every time Bret mentions his Gucci backpack over the course of 600 pages and you will be suitably plastered before the halfway point.) Everyone is gorgeous, the houses are pricey and consequences non-existent. Even the crime scenes look ready for a perfume ad, or the most ghoulish challenge on “America’s Next Top Model.” Of course, Murphy loves a moment of fetishistic violence and things are no different here.
Bret narrates proceedings, with Rigney committing to a mostly decent impersonation of Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman. He’s a writer who loves to embellish and who is eager to offer a definitive examination of the times as they happen. He talks over scenes rather than let them play out for the viewer, and his guiding hand as an unreliable storyteller is perhaps too obviously played in early episodes. The ambiguity of the novel and the paranoia it instils in both protagonist and audience have been seriously diluted. Even though Robert Mallory has moments where you may question his agenda, he seems so obviously on the receiving end of Bret’s own paranoia and lust. Such is a recurring theme with “The Shards”: the ambition of the book is tough to translate through Murphy’s particular lens.
It’s a tough needle to thread, to depict the tedium and emptiness of the ultra-rich without making it look kind of awesome. All of the parties seem like a blast, with or without the coke, and there’s little sense of the perpetual unease that the book captures so acutely. There are only so many times you can watch all these hot high schoolers doing drugs and screwing in public “satirically” before you’re left wondering what the satire is. One wonders if Murphy read the book and thought he had his own “Euphoria” on his hands. HBO’s teen drama may have descended into unfettered rage bait by its final season but it was still capable of emotional heft. Left adrift by the novel’s balance of alienation and obsession, Murphy and company struggle to delve beneath the shiny surface.
Watching “The Shards,” one couldn’t help but revisit “American Psycho,” Mary Harron’s violent black comedy take on the book that brought to the forefront its scathing satire of both ‘80s consumerism and the era’s toxic masculinity. To this day, it’s the only adaptation of an Ellis novel that truly works (despite what the author himself may say) because its perspective is impeccably precise. “The Shards” sorely lacks such focus, with Murphy relying on his familiar bag of tricks to pad out proceedings. Yes, the meta casting of Richard Gere’s son next to Cindy Crawford’s daughter is mildly interesting, but neither Homer Gere nor Kaia Gerber feel equipped for these roles. The latter feels particularly overwhelmed, trying to convey Susan’s growing apathy with samey blankness. In fairness to the cast, the show does seem more focused on their looks, gawking at their bodies (especially those of the actresses) with leering satisfaction. The adult characters fare a little better, with Wes Bentley bringing pathetic sleaze to Debbie’s barely closeted movie producer father Terry and Evan Rachel Wood getting her soap opera bitch on as Debbie’s drunk mother Liz.
“The Shards” on the page is a fake autobiography that acts as a Trojan horse for Ellis to reconcile decades of his work and image as the bad boy of literature. It’s the culmination of years of change, of self-examination and highly meta novels wherein Ellis puts himself front and center for vivisection. You could imagine a successful adaptation of “The Shards” that does away with such baggage, as Murphy and Ellis have attempted to do here, but what would be the point? What are we left with? Another sexy teen drama full of illicit behavior and substances and the occasional grisly murder? More scenes of money and big hair and Human League records playing in the background?
There’s enjoyment to be had, undeniably, but what a big step down from the might of the book. It seems that the ambition of Ellis is beyond the grasp of the Murphy agenda. You cannot help but wish that the showrunner, typically so eager to piss people off, had been brattier this time around.
“The Shards” premieres Wednesday on FX and Hulu.