There's a new Series Adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's The Shards
The show, from producer Ryan Murphy, will air on FX this August, and there's a new trailer out now!
Featured image credit: FX via The Hollywood Reporter
Bret Easton Ellis’s 2023 autofictive horror novel The Shards, which is, in the words of CrimeReads Editor-in-Chief Dwyer Murphy is “genuinely excellent,” is getting a series adaptation. Veteran modern-mainstream-pulp producer Ryan Murphy is helming the project for FX, which stars Kaia Gerber and Igby Rigney, as well as Evan Rachel Wood, Wes Bentley, and Jordan Roth.
Via The Hollywood Reporter, here is FX’s logline for the show: “Set against the vivid backdrop of 1980s Los Angeles, the series follows a group of privileged high school seniors at an elite prep school as they navigate identity, sex, jealousy, obsession and the dangers lurking beneath the surface of American adolescence.”
Ellis’s novel is an alternate memoir of his own senior year of high school. In the novel, the young aspiring novelist narrator Bret becomes obsessed with an enigmatic new transfer student, Robert Mallory, just as much as he becomes obsessed with “The Trawler, a serial killer on the loose who seems to be drawing ever closer to Bret and his friends, taunting them — and Bret in particular — with grotesque threats and horrific, sharply local acts of violence.” Robert’s appearance, and the Trawler’s intensity, seem to correlate… so Bret becomes increasingly suspicious that Robert might be the mysterious killer, or at least, is not all that he seems.
Rigney, a veteran of the Flana-verse, plays Bret, while Homer Gere (son of Richard Gere and Carey Lowell) plays Robert.
Here’s the new trailer:
The Shards will air its first two episodes on Wednesday, Aug. 5 at 9 p.m. ET on Hulu and FX.
Olivia Rutigliano
Olivia Rutigliano is an Editor at Lit Hub and CrimeReads. Her other work appears in Vanity Fair, Vulture, Lapham's Quarterly, AirMail, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, The Baffler, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Politics/Letters, The Toast, Truly Adventurous, and elsewhere. She has a PhD from the departments of English/comparative literature and theatre at Columbia University, where she was the Marion E. Ponsford fellow. She hosts the podcasst "Culture Schlock" at Lit Hub Radio. She is on instagram at @oldebean, twitter at @oldrutigliano, and bluesky at @oliviarutigliano.bsky.social.
