The Shards
Pilot
Season 1
Episode 1
Editor’s Rating
FX’s adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s ‘The Shards’ depicts a Los Angeles that is equal parts enchanting and crawling with danger.
Photo: FX
New shows rarely open with a disclaimer, particularly not one as boilerplate as “This story is fictional. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.” But most new shows aren’t The Shards, adapted from Bret Easton Ellis’s 2023 autofiction novel of the same name. The character at its center is Bret Easton Ellis — played here by Igby Rigney, who does look eerily like the author’s high-school yearbook photo — and the book and series are largely inspired by Ellis’s real-life senior year at the Buckley School. You can understand the need for a clarifying statement because it’s important to recognize where The Shards deviates from reality. This isn’t a coming-of-age story so much as a descent into hell, balancing its teenage angst with one of Ellis’s recurring fixations: a sadistic serial killer. The series’ pilot, co-written by show creators Ellis and Ryan Murphy, does an admirable job of introducing the characters and their fraught dynamics along with the threat of a murderer known only as the Trawler.
As a Shards the novel obsessive, a person who has read every Bret Easton Ellis book (okay, minus the anti-wokeness screed White), and an L.A. native, I’ve been approaching this adaptation with a healthy amount of trepidation, so I’m relieved to report the premiere made me confident we’re in good hands. (Don’t worry, I’ll be writing these recaps for newcomers and book fans alike — though I will include a notes section for readers only at the very bottom.) The cold open is something of a prologue in which we watch Bret take a solo trip to Westwood to see The Shining in May 1980. The movie itself disappoints him for its deviations from the Stephen King novel (including this detail may help preempt criticisms over this adaptation), but he’s also distracted by the presence of a strikingly handsome stranger (Homer Gere). “This boy aroused something primal in me that I’d never felt before,” Bret’s voice-over reveals. “I needed to be his friend. I had to own him.” That’s heavy stuff, if not as heavy as what happens next. There’s someone else seeing The Shining on a Saturday morning, a redhead who doesn’t realize she’s got a date with the Trawler. Back at home, her dog, Shadow, is missing. Everything in her medicine cabinet has been rearranged. And there are phone calls in which she hears nothing but static and heavy breathing. We’ll come to learn these are the serial killer’s trademarks — but the girl is merely confused until she’s abducted by a person in all black while getting into her car.
“This is our story,” Bret says. “Some of us survived high school, some of us died, but none of us made it out alive.” In other words, try not to get too attached to anyone. The story picks up in 1981 as we meet Bret’s inner circle and potential Trawler victims. He’s en route to the Westridge Stables, where his girlfriend, Debbie Schaffer (Hayes Warner), is boarding her horse, Spirit. (The track he’s blasting as he drives down the PCH is Ultravox’s “Vienna,” the closest thing the Shards book has to a theme song.) Bret and Debbie have been dating since she abruptly had sex with him on a chaise lounge at a party earlier in the summer, and though he hadn’t planned on having a girlfriend his senior year, he’s making an effort to be attracted to the opposite sex. If Bret’s in love with any girl, however, it’s his best friend, Susan Reynolds (Kaia Gerber) — in fact, he calls her, “to this very day, the person I think I’ve loved the most in my entire life.”
Of course, he’s also a little in love with Susan’s jock boyfriend, Thom Wright (Graham Campbell), and his “intriguing blankness.” Thom and Susan have been dating since sophomore year and are now the most popular kids in school thanks to the fact they’re “casually beautiful, all-American, and they both came from wealthy families.” Bret, Thom, and Susan are all at the stables to support Debbie — and because getting their licenses has given them unprecedented freedom, with parents who have essentially left their children to fend for themselves. Bret’s parents are off on a monthslong European vacation; his housekeeper, Rosa, is the only adult he sees at home. But despite the independence they’re taking full advantage of, and Thom’s insistence they’re going to rule the school senior year, there’s an undercurrent of melancholy. When the trio talks about Debbie’s last party of the summer — they’ll be attending even though Debbie’s Oscar-winning producer dad has made Thom uncomfortable by hitting on him — Susan admits the Labor Day gathering has her feeling blue. “It’s the end of something,” she muses.
That’s certainly true for Bret. The first thing we see at Debbie’s party is Bret’s classmate Ryan Vaughn (Daniel Dale) telling him things have gotten out of hand and they need to “cool it.” While Bret purports to understand, there are unmistakable tears in his eyes. (Rigney does a great job of allowing emotion to seep into Bret’s performance of practiced nonchalance.) Bret shakes it off once he reconvenes with his friends, with further declarations of a great year to come. “We’ve all worked so hard,” Debbie insists. “We deserve a nice time. We deserve nice things.” Sure, there are hints of potential strife ahead — Susan admitting she doesn’t want to be homecoming queen and the mention of a new student intruding on their senior year — but there’s enough coke to numb any bad feelings. As “This Town” by the Go-Go’s plays, Bret reflects via voice-over, “That night in September was one of the last nights where there was no fear.”
Later on, Bret wanders away from his friends and runs into Debbie’s father, Terry Schaffer (Wes Bentley), entertaining handsome young men in the hot tub. The gay rumors about Terry are obviously true — not to mention his predilection for his daughter’s friends — but that doesn’t faze Bret, who is hoping Terry might buy the novel he’s writing and let him adapt it for the screen. It’s probably a good sign Terry suggests a lunch at Le Dome, noting that he’s always on the lookout for “new young voices.” Whatever subtext is there bubbles to the surface in the next scene, when Bret is ambushed by Debbie’s mother, Liz (Evan Rachel Wood), who is too sloshed to bite her tongue and starts asking after her husband. “Was he in the bushes sucking some guy’s dick?” she demands. “Or did he proposition you?” Bret deflects just long enough to be saved by Terry’s assistant, Steven Reinhardt (Jordan Roth), a man whose alien appearance and stilted demeanor are unnerving in their own right.
None of this stops Bret from keeping his date with Debbie in her shockingly pink bedroom upstairs. And it will take more than the strange phone call she receives (more static and heavy breathing) to dampen her libido. The two begin to have sex to Joan Jett’s cover of “Crimson and Clover,” but they don’t get far before we cut to Bret in a different bed with someone else, Buckley class stoner Matt Kellner (Owen Painter). Bret’s voice-over explains his relationship with Debbie was part of his public persona, while his relationship with Matt was a secret. In 1981, “you had to be two people, which was fucking exhausting,” he notes. “You had to compartmentalize.” They’re in Matt’s bedroom after Debbie’s party, and though Bret chastises Matt for not attending, it’s clear they’re both having more fun here than they would be there. The conversation is illuminating for what goes unspoken with both boys refusing to acknowledge whatever is going on between them. When Bret suggests they “stop this,” Matt acts like there’s nothing to stop. “I wouldn’t want you to think that I don’t care,” Bret shares with rare vulnerability. All Matt can say is “I don’t think anything.” It might be denial, or it might be that Matt is too stoned to hold coherent thoughts. He’s oddly nonchalant when Bret asks why all his fish are missing from his fish tank. Bret asks if the cat might have eaten them, and while they laugh about it, Matt has to admit the cat is missing, too.
It’s an unsettling end to the summer, and the ominous vibes continue into the first day of senior year. While getting ready for school in the morning, Bret sees a news report about the mutilated body of a teenage girl found on a tennis court in Woodland Hills. He arrives at Buckley to more carnage: The statue of the school’s griffin mascot has been desecrated with the butchered bodies of koi fish from the pond below. Probably just a prank by Harvard kids, Susan assures him. And by lunch, the bloody tableau has been forgotten, right on time for the arrival of Robert Mallory, the new student Susan had warned the others about. Bret is stunned to discover Robert is the boy he saw at The Shining, yet despite the undeniable attraction Bret feels, something is off from the jump. Robert’s backstory — his life in Chicago, his mother’s tragic accidental death, his dad wanting to send him to military school, his aunt in Century City offering to take him in — sounds overly rehearsed. And when Bret brings up having spotted Robert in Westwood last May, Robert insists it wasn’t him, which means he’s a liar. Rigney and Gere play this back-and-forth perfectly, the instantly emerging tension between them barely concealed behind tight smiles. Homer Gere is especially smart casting for Robert. In real life, he’s the son of Richard Gere, an object of Bret’s masturbatory fantasies in the book. Bret’s obsession with the movie American Gigolo is a heavy influence on the novel he’s writing, down to naming the hustler at its center Julian.
Although Bret has been fixated on Robert from the moment they first locked eyes, his obsession turns adversarial over the course of the day, made worse when he spots Robert talking to both of Bret’s secret lovers, Ryan and Matt. “Robert Mallory was like a virus, a new kind of insidious invading agent who was here to destroy the very cellular structure of my friends, my school, and me,” Bret intones. He decides Robert must be up to something and spontaneously follows him after school to find out more. What starts as harmless tailing quickly evolves into something much more dangerous — Bret’s high-speed pursuit isn’t subtle, and Robert turns the tables on him by pulling over and then tapping Bret’s Mercedes 450SL from behind. They both end up at the Sherman Oaks Galleria, where Bret weakly denies he was following Robert in the first place. For his part, Robert confesses he doesn’t like being followed. Bret is too on edge to play this scene with any sort of chill. He tries to confront Robert about talking to Matt, but as soon as Robert asks if the two are friends, Bret can’t help but blurt out an overly revealing “Is that innuendo?” By the time Robert is calling Susan “quite the little honey” and asking how serious she is with Thom, Bret is having trouble breathing. He leaves the mall abruptly but not before Robert hits him with a haunting diagnosis: “When you talk to me, you’re really talking to yourself, dude.”
There’s no time to puzzle over what it means. When Bret returns home, he faces the news of a new Trawler victim found behind a Tower Records. We see flashes of what’s been done to her — fish shoved into her eye sockets, a dog’s severed head sewn onto her shoulder — which is enough for a nearby cop (and possibly some sensitive audience members) to vomit on the spot. “The city had become paralyzed with fear,” Bret’s voice-over announces. Meanwhile, whatever distance he might feel from the Trawler all but disappears when he gets a phone call of his own. This time, it’s more than just static and heavy breathing — someone is screaming and sobbing on the other end of the line. “Help me,” the voice pleads. “Please help me.”
• In order not to ruin things for those who haven’t read The Shards, I’ll be using this section to talk about the show as an adaptation, including any major changes from the novel. Please be cautious about spoiling things in the comments — and make sure to use the “spoiler” tag if you do include any plot points from the book!
• Very curious to know how the casting of the show matches (or doesn’t match) the images in your head. For me, Bret, Robert, Matt, Terry, Liz, and Steven all feel true enough to the source material, and while Gerber doesn’t look like book Susan, she’s another smart bit of ’80s nepo casting as the look-alike daughter of Cindy Crawford. I’m not yet sold on Thom, Debbie, or Ryan.
• I am, however, really impressed by the attention to detail when it comes to capturing ’80s L.A. As someone who grew up going to movies in Westwood and eating at Hamburger Hamlet (in the ’90s, but still), I felt a rush of nostalgia in that opening scene.
• Overall, the pilot is remarkably faithful to the novel, which I imagine will be less true as the season progresses. The only real change thus far seems to be the increased presence of the Trawler with earlier phone calls to Debbie and Bret. Everyone is also aware of the desecration of the griffin, though I’m not sure anyone but Bret will make any connection to the serial killer.
• Speaking of, the Trawler’s “alterations” are as graphic here as they are in the book. I really wasn’t sure the show would go there, given the horrific animal cruelty involved, but Murphy has never been one to hold back on stomach-turning gore.
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