The Cutprice Guignol

The Shards? More like The Sharts, am I right?

And that might seem like a low-effort joke to make to open this review, but I’m only trying to match the energy that Ryan Murphy brought to his newest release – The Shards, an adaptation of the novel of the same name that he partially adapted alongside the author, Brett Easton Ellis. After the moderate success of The Beauty earlier this year, I decided to give the first few episodes of his latest show a go, despite the fact I should really know better by now. I got stung by a wasp today, and I decided it was time to let myself get stung by some more WASP-ishness just to keep the theme going. Following a group of teens in Los Angeles in the 1980s, The Shards tracks their usual senior year troubles: sex, relationships, the arrival of a mysterious new classmate, and good ol’ California serial killer.

I’ll cut to the chase: The Shards is dreadful. It’s a hopelessly insipid show masquerading as something meaningful, throwing sex, drugs, and violence at the wall in the hopes of cold-clocking you into thinking something worth watching is happening. It’s a show that centres on vapidity, but, as with so many pieces of media that put this in the firing line of their fiction, without anything profound to say nor a profound way to say it, it ends up just as empty as the characters at its heart.

But what of the characters? Well,Igby Rigney stars as a fictionalized Brett Easton Ellis in a performance that swings between trudging pop cultural monologues and Just Looking Really Hard at the objects of his various affections like my cat standing over her food bowl come seven-thirty every night, and the role itself is impossible to divorce from the author himself in a way that’s inherently distracting. I’m not saying authors can’t include themselves in their work, but when those self-inserts have women screaming on the end of your cock about what an incredible lover you are every episode, maybe we need to go back to the drawing board, huh? Homer Gere and Kaia Gerber – children of Richard Gere and Cindy Crawford, respectively, whose stardom in the time period this show is set can’t be a coincidence – are honestly pretty shockingly bad, particularly Gere, who clearly thinks he’s giving smouldering, mysterious sex bomb but is actually delivering me squinting at the bus timetable from across the road. Hayes Warner is moderately fun as Debbie, but the character is such a seethingly vapid collection of teen girl tropes that she wears pretty thin after an episode or two (appropriate, since thinness seems to be a major driving force in her entire personality).

The rest of the world that The Shards inhabits is dotted with venomous cliches and moderately interesting characters who get sidelined for another slow-motion sequence of Kaia Gerber dancing in a bikini; amongst them, Evan Rachel Wood as Debbie’s mother is probably the most entertaining, and Jordan Roth as the immaculately-styled Steven at least offers a bit of genuine mystery and intrigue. I regret to inform you that Wes Bentley is here, and not redeeming any of his dreadful performances in American Horror Story with this one, but at least Dot-Marie Jones, my beloved, also makes an appearance, so that’s something, at least.

Stylistically, the show is well-constructed enough; I’m not looking for complete period accuracy, so throw in an exquisite eighties soundtrack, a line of cocaine, and a pair of unflattering shorts, and I’m pretty much sold. The non-stop barrage of consumer references to ground the show in a time and place feels very true to Easton Ellis’ work as a whole (derogatory), but it just about works for characters who are meant to be this empty. But that’s about where my willingness to give credit to production ends, because everything else about the nuts and bolts of The Shards is just fucking dreadful – the show hides behind the lazy trope of having a writer as a lead character who narrates everything with the overwrought prose of a teenage wannabe-author (and I say that, as someone who fell firmly into that category myself, with learned disdain), and there’s not a metaphor that goes unspoken, not a piece of imagery that goes underlined, not a meaningful moment that doesn’t come with a great big neon flashing night shouting “SEE? SEE? DID YOU GET IT? DO YOU UNDERSTAND?”. If the show had leaned a little more into its camp side, maybe this would have worked as a kind of wink-wink take on the much-needed cringe of teenage creativity, but as it stands, it’s just grating.

Of course, there’s the serial killer plot to contend with, which is about as interesting as you’d imagine from Murphy at this point in his career – which is to say, not at all. Murphy has often taken this thigh-rubbing approach to serial killers that wants to dress itself up as cogent commentary on their enduring place in pop culture, and it doesn’t even really feel like his heart is in this one to start with. Yes, the kills are violent, the young women’s bodies displayed in grotesque friezes, the animals mutilated, etc, etc, but none of it is really saying much. I recently watched Them: The Scare, a serial killer horror set in Los Angeles just a few years after this one is, and it’s such a stark difference to see a show that has something to say with its violence compared to one that seems to be creating snapshots for YouTube reactors to gawp over in thumbnails.

The Shards is a show that can’t seem to decide whether it’s casting a wry eye over the archly camp world of the rich adolescent, or a relatively serious attempt at a moody period piece investigating the cultural obsession with serial killers – and what we end up with is a cack-handed mix of the two that leaves both sides feeling as cavernous and empty as the parent-free houses of the teens at the wrong end of the killer’s murderous nature. What are you thinking of The Shards so far? Where does it rank on Ryan Murphy’s expansive back catalogue for you? Let me know in the comments below!

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(header image via The Hollywood Reporter)