I was a long time fan of Bret Easton Ellis. His novels were among those that inspired my own writing. I even got to meet him at the New Haven Public Library when he was touring and reading from Lunar Park. He was very nice and I still have my autographed copy.

Some of his views I don’t agree with and feel some things probably shouldn’t be satirized. A lot of the early books gave the impression that he wouldn’t write about these things in such a nihilistic setting if it weren’t right in front of his face or going up his nose.

I opted out of reading the Shards when it was published, the first since Imperial bedrooms thirteen plus years ago. I knew of it, but it was off the radar until I learned it was adapted to TV.

For years, I held and pontificated on the belief that book adaptations worked best as TV miniseries. Details from the book, some pretty key, are cut to make a screenplay that will be greenlit. Maybe not that good, but adaptable. Of the Bret Easton Ellis works adapted to film, American Psycho was the best, but Ellis addressed how bad Less than Zero turned out as a film in the sequel, Imperial Bedrooms. Actually, it was the first paragraphs of that book…..and years and years later, he writes the Shards as autobiographical fiction from an unreliable narrator. He tells the story of his senior year interspersed with parties, wealth, cults and a serial killer.

Just your average high school experience in 1981 Los Angeles.

The first two episodes drop to Hulu in August. I watch the first episode and post to my Bluesky that this episode was better than it deserved to be. Too tired to watch the second, I wait until the next day, and ask myself, why was this my visceral reaction to the episode having never read the book? I then think about who adapted this to television and it hit me.

I have watched many of Ryan Murphy’s shows. As a fan of both horror and true crime, I was bound to run into him at some point. I loved Pose and there are excellent seasons of American Horror Story. I can see where he ran into controversy with Monster. With Ed Gein, there were inaccuracies and the Menendez season was criticized for oversexualization.

I joked about watching the first season of Monster about Jeffrey Dahmer due to a mild infatuation with Evan Peters in the titular role. First off, Niecy Nash stole that season. Secondly, let’s just say Murphy took some liberties. Word for word liberties. I remember following this case back when it made headlines. The adapted trial scenes could have been the same trial I saw over thirty years ago. This upset family members of Dahmer’s victims and understandably so.

I know they all can’t be Pose, but come on. I wish Monster didn’t get a fourth season as FX viewers ill need Lizzie Borden misrepresented more than she already was.

That said, I saw Murphy’s name attached to the adaptation of a Bret Easton Ellis novel and couldn’t help but think that in theory this was the perfect pairing. Murphy can definitely be word for word. The setting will be glitzy, yet gritty in a bright but basic way. Watching this, you get the sense of two things. First off, The Shards as a story comes across as the coke baby of The rules of attraction and American psycho. Also, Ellis and Murphy are all about the kind of 80’s nostalgia with neon soaked killers and cults on the loose.

At this point, it seems Ryan Murphy doesn’t have a cast so much as a troupe. He pulls a lot of the same actors from various productions. It works, especially with lead actors being the kids of 80’s staples Cindy Crawford and Richard Gere. The actor playing possibly unreliable narrator Bret strongly resembles a younger Evan Peters to an almost unsettling degree, almost as weird as the displayed corpses.

I don’t know how the rest of this miniseries will play out, but if Murphy wanted to adapt other novels such as Less than Zero and Imperial Bedrooms, he could easily cast the same people as Ellis’s characters are pretty interchangeable and I suspect purposely so to bring home the point of cookie cutter wealthy people.

I’d just as soon that get adapted than crappy American Horror Story spinoffs or another season of Monster.

I’ll give it this much. It’s beautifully shot and that soundtrack is amazing.