“It became clear to me after our second introduction that 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. He was up to something, and it was up to me to find out exactly what it was.” Herein, I believe, lies the secret of exactly how seriously you’re meant to take FX‘s The Shards. Feel how you will about Ryan Murphy and Bret Easton Ellis, the provocateurs who adapted the series from Ellis’s novel of the same name — itself a work of autofiction, juxtaposing details from Ellis’s real childhood with pure invention — but they understand how this sounds.
These are the words of a teenager, Bret Easton Ellis’s fictional avatar in fact, declaring that another teenager is a virus out to destroy everything, And Only I Can Stop Him. It’s superhero dialogue, coming from the mouth of a kid who looks like Peter Parker, but enjoys luxury living like Jordan Belfort…or Patrick Bateman. And why has he decided that this newcomer to his clique is pure evil? Because the guy fibbed about, or just plain forgot, seeing Bret for five seconds at an opening-day screening of The Shining half a year earlier. The monster!
It’s funny on purpose, is what I’m saying. If you want to appreciate The Shards, you’ll have to get on that level.
Igby Rigney stars as Bret Easton Ellis, a high school senior living in the Hollywood Hills with his rich, perpetually absent parents. An aspiring writer (he dislikes Kubrick’s The Shining because it was so different from the Stephen King novel, which he adores), he’s also coming to grips with his sexuality, in the stop-start fashion that was the only option available to kids like him back in 1981.
On the surface, Bret is one of the most popular kids in school. He’s best friends, and not-so-secretly in love, with Susan Reynolds (Kaia Gerber), student body president, straight-A student, and all around babe. Seriously: I’m sure she gets tired of hearing this and I won’t dwell on it, but holy shit, Gerber looks so much like her supermodel mother Cindy Crawford that it’s like a special effect.
Susan is dating Bret’s pal Thom Wright (Graham Campbell), a golden god with a chill disposition and a mop of blond hair. Rounding out the crew is Bret’s girlfriend Debby Schaffer (Hayes Warner), who’s so rich and blonde and beautiful she can get away with pretty much anything. This includes persuading Bret, who’d been on the verge of phasing out sexual attraction to girls except for Susan, to date her.
Besides being a good time in the sack (or the chaise longue), Debbie has showbiz connections via her producer father, Terry (Wes Bentley). So what if he’s obviously gay, basically estranged from his alcoholic wife Liz (Evan Rachel Wood), and in league with his peculiar major domo Steven Reinhardt (Jordan Roth), who looks like the Black Lodge doppelganger of David Sylvian from the New Wave band Japan. He might be the man who can turn the book Bret’s been writing into a movie. At a drug-fueled back-to-school pool party at Debbie’s, Terry and Bret agree to do lunch.
But something is bothering Bret, and it’s not just breaking up with his secret boyfriend, Matt Kellner (Owen Painter). It’s Robert Mallory (Homer Gere), the new kid in school.
Bret recognizes the personable newcomer’s striking face: He saw, and instantly became obsessed with, the guy at The Shining months earlier. When he becomes convinced Robert is lying about not having been there or seen the movie at all, he immediately theorizes that Robert is a chaos agent who will burn civilization, or at least the Hills, to the ground. It’s a good bit.
What follows is even funnier: He engages in a high-speed car chase to follow Robert, who gets the drop on him with some clever driving and winds up chasing Bret instead. The two then meet cute at the Galleria mall, where they talk cordially as if they weren’t just in a life-and-death automobile situation. Robert says he doesn’t like being followed, he still hasn’t seen The Shining…and adds “When you talk to me, you’re really talking to yourself, dude.”
The reason the older Bret is choosing to recount this story, though, isn’t because Robert lied about seeing a horror movie. It’s because a real-life horror has been unfolding at the same time. A serial killer called the Trawler has been stalking the city. First he breaks into his victims’ homes, rearranging their stuff and stealing their pets. Then he makes prank phone calls, with only static and heavy breathing on the line. Then he assaults and abducts them. Then he stages their bodies in elaborate, Hannibal/True Detective tableaux, their cavities stuffed with pet parts. This same figure is likely responsible for defacing the protagonists’ unnamed school’s mascot statue with animal remains the same day Robert arrived.
Wait a minute…you don’t suspect…?
Well, of course you do. You’re supposed to. Bret, who sounds like both the real Bret and Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman, all but tells you to. The episode ends with Bret receiving a distressing call, consisting of staticky cries of agony in a voice that sounds a lot like Matt’s; Bret had seen Robert arguing with Matt in the park, and had an awkward conversation laden with innuendo about the kid in the mall. This is a whodunit, sure, but it’s more a did this one specific guy do it
That question, I suspect, will be more complicated than, like, finding Robert’s fingerprints at the scene of the crime. The entire project blends fact, fiction, and film, such that it’s impossible to tell where each one begins and the others end. Directed by Murphy from a script he co-wrote with Ellis, this episode references not just Ellis’s novel, or his novels about dissolute young people Less Than Zero (the one he was working on at this point in his life) and The Rules of Attraction, or his other novel American Psycho (the one about a wealthy, handsome, incredibly sadistic serial killer), but also the movies based on those books, The Secret History by his college friend Donna Tartt, Brian De Palma’s über-stylish early-’80s Hollywood erotic thriller Body Double, the work of Nicholas Winding Refn and Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese, slasher films, Fast Times at Ridgemont High via the Cars’ “Moving in Stereo,” and Murphy’s own oeuvre, with its lurid twin poles of glamour and violence. Meanwhile, Robert comes as close to saying “I am some kind of manifestation of your own subconscious” as a character can outside the final reel of Fight Club.
How real is any of this, anyway? At the very least, how seriously are we supposed to take any of it? With episode two debuting simultaneously we won’t have to wait long to find out more, but I think the fact that the first scene involves “Bret Easton Ellis” going to the movies — entering a fantasy story about a murderer — speaks volumes. So does a line early on when narrator Bret complains that “kids today have it fucking easy” because back in his day, “We had it tougher: We had to deal with serial killers” — as if Night Stalkers and Hillside Stranglers were as common as school shootings or unaffordable rents. Ellis, Murphy, someone involved here knows how this sounds, and is counting on the audience to know it too.
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.