Two Maximalists, One Serial Killer, and a Lot of ’80s Hair
Ryan Murphy and Bret Easton Ellis are not men known for restraint. Murphy built a television empire on operatic violence, camp excess, and the kind of production design that makes your eyes feel assaulted in the best possible way. Ellis wrote American Psycho, a novel so deliberately repellent that its original publisher dropped it before it ever reached shelves. The two of them colliding over Ellis’s autofiction serial-killer novel The Shards is either the most logical pairing in recent Hollywood memory or a signal that the culture has fully surrendered to its own worst impulses – possibly both.
The adaptation is happening.
Murphy is producing and directing the screen version of The Shards, the novel Ellis published in 2023 after releasing it as a podcast serial. The story centers on a fictionalized teenage version of Ellis himself, set in early-1980s Los Angeles, surrounded by wealthy private school classmates and stalked – or perhaps not – by a serial killer drifting through the margins of their gilded social world. It is obsessive, unreliable, soaked in brand names and swimming pools and dread, and it reads like someone took the aesthetic DNA of Less Than Zero and injected it with something genuinely sinister.
What Ellis Built, and Why Murphy Is the Right Person to Break It
Ellis spent decades being misread as a provocateur who mistook shock for substance. The more generous – and accurate – reading of his work is that he has always been doing something more uncomfortable: using surfaces to expose the rot underneath them. The Shards leans into that tendency harder than anything he has written before, because the narrator is nominally himself, a 17-year-old Bret at the Buckley School in Los Angeles in 1981, watching his social circle fray while something dark closes in around them. The novel’s horror is never entirely separable from its teenage melodrama, and that ambiguity is exactly where it gets interesting.
Murphy’s television work – American Horror Story, Dahmer, Ratched, Hollywood – has consistently orbited questions of American violence, beauty, and the specific psychological damage inflicted by a culture that worships both. His shows are excessive by design, maximalist in visual language, and frequently anchored by what his audience has come to call “demon twinks”: beautiful, destructive young men who function as both victims and agents of chaos. The Shards traffics in exactly that archetype. The mysterious Robert Mallory, the novel’s most magnetic and threatening figure, fits the template so precisely it is almost difficult to believe Murphy did not commission the book himself.
The ’80s Los Angeles setting gives the production a visual palette Murphy has mined before – sun-bleached decadence, the specific ugliness of wealth in that era, the way Reagan-era affluence created a kind of moral numbness that Ellis spent his entire early career cataloguing. For the Style section, that backdrop matters: this is a period whose fashion moment has been cycling back through runways and editorial for the better part of three years, and a prestige television production shot through that lens will land at exactly the moment the aesthetic has reached its widest mainstream audience.
Autofiction, Casting, and the Particular Tension of Playing a Real Person
The casting question for any autofiction adaptation is whether you find an actor who resembles the real person, or one who captures the interior life the author has constructed around their fictional stand-in. Ellis’s teenage self in The Shards is passive, voyeuristic, deeply closeted, and narrating from a remove of decades – already processing events he may not fully understand as they happen. That is a genuinely difficult performance to anchor, requiring an actor who can hold confusion and observation simultaneously without collapsing into blankness.
No formal casting announcements have been made public at this stage. Given Murphy’s established stable of collaborators – actors who have cycled through multiple projects in his universe – there is reasonable expectation that familiar faces will surface when production details emerge. Murphy tends to build ensembles rather than rely on singular star power, which suits The Shards well: the novel functions as a portrait of an entire social ecosystem, not a single protagonist’s journey through it.
The demon twink question – Murphy’s recurring figure of the beautiful, volatile young man who destabilizes everything around him – is not incidental here. It is structural. Ellis built the novel around that tension between surface appeal and underlying menace, and Murphy has spent years developing the visual and narrative grammar to put that figure on screen in ways that implicate the audience’s attraction rather than simply aestheticizing it. The combination suggests a show that will make viewers uncomfortable about what, precisely, they are enjoying.
Why This Show Arrives at Exactly This Cultural Moment
There is a specific appetite right now for media that takes the aesthetics of a certain kind of toxic privilege seriously without sanitizing them – that looks at gilded, destructive social worlds and refuses to pretend the danger there is incidental rather than structural. The Shards, both as a novel and as a forthcoming television adaptation, operates squarely in that space. Ellis wrote a book about the way beauty and wealth create conditions for violence by making it easy not to look. Murphy has built a career making it impossible to look away.
The ’80s excess promised by the source material is not set dressing. It is the argument. The brand names, the parties, the cars, the clothes – in Ellis’s work, those details are never neutral. They are the mechanism through which characters avoid confronting what is actually happening around them, and in The Shards, what is happening around them is that someone may be killing people and the social world is too absorbed in its own performance to notice. That dynamic feels less like period nostalgia and more like a diagnosis with a very long tail.
If Murphy executes this the way his best work suggests he can, The Shards will not be a show that audiences feel good about watching. Ellis never wrote books that made readers feel good about reading them. That shared commitment to a certain kind of productive discomfort is the actual reason this collaboration makes sense – not the surface-level alignment of aesthetics, but the deeper agreement that entertainment can function as an indictment of the very appetites it satisfies.
The question lingering over all of it is whether prestige television, with its structural need to extend and inflate and add episodes, can hold the precise, claustrophobic tension Ellis constructed in prose – or whether the format will slowly exhaust what the novel kept tightly wound.
