Ryan Murphy and Bret Easton Ellis turn 1980s Los Angeles into a crime scene, and the city looks exactly like itself
LOS ANGELES (The Hollywood Times) August 5, 2026 — Bret Easton Ellis has spent forty years writing about a version of Los Angeles that most people outside it assume is exaggerated. It isn’t. I know firsthand. After tonight, a lot more people are going to see that for themselves.
FX premieres “The Shards” on August 5 at 9 p.m. ET / 6 p.m. PT on FX and Hulu, with Disney+ carrying it in international territories. The series comes from executive producer Ryan Murphy and adapts Ellis’s bestselling novel, a book that arrived with the strange authority of something half-remembered rather than invented.
I read the book. I lived the story. Now I get to see how Murphy’s interpretation plays out.
The setting is 1980s Los Angeles, and the world is a private prep school full of seniors with money, cars, and almost no supervision. The series follows them through identity, sex, jealousy and obsession, and through the specific danger of being seventeen in a city that treats you like an adult before you are one. There is also someone killing teenagers.
Except for that last part, I know this playground of ’80s LA, youth and sex and drugs. It’s where I played when I was the age of these characters. I’ll watch tonight to see how right they got it.
At the center of the narrative is Bret, played by Igby Rigney, an aspiring writer and a compulsive observer, which turns out to be the same affliction. His reality starts coming apart when Robert Mallory, played by Homer Gere, transfers in just before senior year. Robert is magnetic and unreadable, and his arrival lines up with the rise of The Trawler, a serial killer working his way through high schools across the city.
Around Bret is a social circle so tightly wound it functions as a single organism: Susan Reynolds (Kaia Gerber), Debbie Schaffer (Hayes Warner) and Thom Wright (Graham Campbell). Beauty, parties, excess, and the constant low-grade surveillance that comes with belonging to a group like that.
The adults are worse, which is the point. Wes Bentley plays Terry Schaffer, Evan Rachel Wood plays Liz Schaffer, and Jordan Roth plays Steven Reinhardt. Ellis has never been interested in adults as rescuers. In his Los Angeles they are the weather system the kids are trying to survive.
At that time my friends and I knew which adults to avoid at closed-door talent auditions, private student-teacher conferences and parents’ parties. We talked about it the way you talk about weather.
What makes this adaptation worth watching closely is the collision of two authorial voices that usually refuse to share space. Ellis writes cold, flat and withholding. Murphy directs hot, lush and maximalist. On paper those instincts cancel each other out. In practice, a novel this interior needs someone willing to make it look like something, and Murphy has never been shy about that.
The series is executive produced by Murphy, Nina Jacobson, Brad Simpson, Ellis, Eric Kovtun, Scott Robertson, Nissa Diederich, Tanase Popa, Nick Hall, Michael Uppendahl, Max Winkler, Kathleen McCaffrey and Brian Young. It is produced by 20th Television.
FX has earned the benefit of the doubt on material like this. The same brand that delivered “American Crime Story,” “Fargo,” “Pose,” “Shōgun” and “The Bear” has a long record of handing difficult work to people who will not sand it down.
“The Shards” is not an easy book to film. It’s built almost entirely out of narration, paranoia and unreliable memory. Bret is telling us a story about himself decades later and he is not a trustworthy witness. Television has to externalize that, and externalizing paranoia is how you accidentally make a slasher. Whether the series holds its nerve and stays inside Bret’s head is the thing I’ll be tracking while the series unfolds.
Period markers like big hair, shoulder pads and ’80s pop will be fun but it’s the feeling of the era I’m looking to slip into. Not for nostalgia but for the immersive experience. Let’s see if Ellis, Murphy and the cast are able to take me there.
“The Shards” premieres Wednesday, August 5 on FX and Hulu, and on Disney+ internationally.
