When I was in college one of my roommates was obsessed with looking at pornographic pictures of water sports – and specifically golden showers. He’d spend hours at a time scrolling through them, constantly and loudly exclaiming “ew” and “gross” in the common area of our four-bed suite, often calling us over to show us the pictures and ask us if we also thought these pictures were disgusting. The whole process wasn’t off-putting so much as exhausting… He clearly liked these pictures and got off on them, and at least part of checking with us was to see if we, too, were interested in this sort of thing. We weren’t, but we also really didn’t care that much; that’s what he was into, we were definitely not into that, and mostly would have liked him to shut up for a second so we could study.
This is a belabored way of expressing what it’s like to watch a lesser Ryan Murphy show such as FX’s The Shards, adapted from the book by Bret Easton Ellis. Murphy revels in showing off horrific scenes of murder, naughty scenes of sexually fluid, chiseled “teens” who are played by late twenty-somethings sleeping with each other, drinking, and taunting classmates in order to get a reaction. The characters in the show are similar to that old roommate of mine, but so is Murphy. “Isn’t this weird and horrifying?” he seems to be saying. “Isn’t this all grotesque?” “Don’t you absolutely hate this?” But aside from a few sparks here and there, Murphy has played this game so many times, we get it already: you like all this stuff, it’s fine, and either you’re someone who delights in seeing the same generically beautiful actors hit the same beats again and again in subsequent Murphy productions, or you just find the whole act exhausting.
On paper, at least, Ellis and Murphy should be the perfect pair. Both provocateurs, both obsessed with the raunchy sex lives and horrific deaths of the vapid rich… The creator of American Horror Story and Scream Queens likely wouldn’t even exist if it wasn’t for the author of American Psycho and Rules of Attraction. But Ellis is an author who needs an interpreter on screen, and Murphy is not that; he’s a reproducer. American Psycho the movie works because writer/director Mary Harron looked at the purposefully hyper-misogynistic narrative Ellis created for his seminal work and flipped it over with a satirical and feminist lens. Less Than Zero, Ellis’s first novel, was adapted into a more straightforward film but benefited from his cynical worldview perfectly gelling with the myth of prime period Brat Pack.
The Shards, meanwhile, is a semi-autobiographical take on Ellis’s real life, the time when he was writing Less Than Zero, infused with a “what if” scenario that imagines a Patrick Bateman-esque (the anti-hero of American Psycho) serial killer called The Trawler slowly murdering off his classmates. Is The Trawler the mysterious and enigmatic new student Robert Mallory (Homer Gere) who arrived in Ellis’s (Igby Rigney) high-end Hollywood Hills prep school at the same time for Senior year? The creeptastic producer Terry Schaffer (Wes Bentley, still doing discount Jake Gyllenhaal after all these years)? Or perhaps the killer is actually far, far closer to home? Like, real close. Like, it’s Ellis. Maybe?
It’s an across the plate pitch for someone like Murphy, and to strain a poor sports metaphor he bunts it all the way to first base with nine episodes (the full season was provided for critics) that takes the regular Murphy route of stretching and straining what could be a concise and thematically pointed narrative and instead spinning it out into digressions that distract from the main plot before losing said plot entirely. And then it just sort of ends, setting up a highly unnecessary second season that will likely only strain things further into superfluousness.
Worst of all? It’s boring. It’s not even funny or satirical (for an actual horror comedy, go watch the far superior Widow’s Bay, which does everything The Shards can’t muster the focus to pull off, and in one slasher-focused half-hour, no less). And at least part of that is the central character, Bret Easton Ellis, is as blandly vacuous as the people he’s ostensibly observing and writing about, as singularly uninterested in getting below the surface of the characters who happen to be his group of friends as Murphy seems to be writing about them. Those include the homecoming king/quarterback Thom (Graham Campbell, oddly cast against type), his girlfriend Susan (Kaia Gerber) who Bret is in love with, and Bret’s girlfriend Debbie (Hayes Warner) who strives for perfection but can never reach it to her satisfaction. The cast is all doing their best with stilted dialogue pitched at the height of soap opera that never even comes close to the pulpy froth of the best of a daytime drama, but every profession of what’s truly in their hearts is augmented by histrionics and waterworks in order to attempt to make any of this land in a semi-human manner.
Part of the point is while their feathered hair ‘80s high school drama is going on (by the way, take a drink every time someone says a variation of “it’s the 1980s” like they’re in a BoJack Horseman flashback and you will be dead of alcohol poisoning by the end of the pilot), their classmates are being murdered, yet they can hardly bring themselves to care. But versus the parallel tracks of American Psycho that compare ‘80s Wall Street to merciless murders, if the characters don’t care, we don’t care. The experience of watching The Shards is often akin to watching someone who has never met a high school kid before try to do a teen drama (it doesn’t help that this show can’t even pretend to make these late twenty-somethings look or act like teenagers), while every once in a while it cuts over to a mostly nonsensical ‘80s slasher movie.
The two threads start to gel more towards the second half of the season, but at the same time Murphy does his regular heaping on of other plotlines ranging from the rise of VHS porn to other killers and maniacal cults, muddying the process even further. Even one of Murphy’s thematic predilections – closted gay men – should be a home run, since he’s done this plotline one zillion times before. But when everyone on the show is a secretly closeted gay man, it loses a lot of the power the plotline could potentially have had if it was just the main character struggling with keeping his own sexuality secret.
As with any Murphy mess, there are highlights. A weird episode in the back half of the season almost entirely takes place at a dancing show hosted by now-Murphy-mainstay Anthony Ramos, does an effective job of conveying character drama through dance, and feels a bit like a lost episode of Glee, for better or worse. At the very least it’s interesting to watch versus the somnambulic pacing and performances we get for most of the season. Related to that, the music is routinely Very Good ‘80s Tunes throughout, so perhaps this would have worked better as a soundtrack on vinyl than a TV show. And performance-wise, Gere, not veering too far from his debut role as a predatory influencer on this past season of Euphoria, is purposefully playing a riff on Jack Nicholson as the serpentine Robert Mallory – appropriate, as he’s introduced at a screening of The Shining – even if the show can’t seem to decide what his character actually is actually about, or even doing from scene to scene.
The issue, to get back to it, is that Ellis, at his best, writes about burnt-out empty shells of humans wandering around society, robots either attempting to figure out how to feel or deciding to not feel and instead murder (funny that Evan Rachel Wood pops up in here in an underwritten and underserved role, after playing that whole robot arc over four seasons to greater effect on HBO’s Westworld). But Murphy – Ellis co-created the show with him, and co-writes several episodes – doesn’t know how to translate those plots into a TV show that digs any deeper than surface level. There are events being presented on screen, but it’s not saying anything.
And when you’re merely presenting instead of digging into why you’re presenting, it’s the nine-hour equivalent of that roommate flipping through fetish porn. Perhaps he’s getting a thrill, but everyone around him would just like him to shut up.
The Shards premieres today on FX and Hulu with two new episodes.
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