From Page to Screen, With the Volume Up
Bret Easton Ellis spent decades being literature’s most polarizing chronicler of American excess – the writer who made readers uncomfortable precisely because the discomfort felt so accurate. Now his 2023 novel The Shards is becoming an FX series, and the trailer already carries that familiar Ellis texture: beautiful surfaces, something rotten just underneath them.
Ryan Murphy is producing.
That pairing – Ellis’s literary architecture of privilege and Murphy’s taste for dark, heightened drama – is less a surprise than it might appear on paper. Murphy told Vogue this week that he has “always loved, borderline worshipped, Bret’s work,” adding that the two writers grew up in essentially the same cultural moment. “We’re pretty much the same age, and I grew up with [his books]. He’s interested in the things I’m interested in.” When a producer describes an author that way, the collaboration tends to either collapse under mutual admiration or produce something genuinely strange. The trailer suggests it’s leaning toward the latter.
What the Show Is, and Where It Lives
The Shards is set in Los Angeles in the 1980s, following a group of privileged high school seniors at an elite prep school. The terrain is recognizable Ellis country: identity, sexual tension, jealousy, obsession, and what the source novel frames as particularly American violence. The prep school setting isn’t incidental – Ellis has always used institutions of inherited wealth as pressure chambers, places where the aesthetics of a good life and the behavior of people inside it slide dangerously apart.
Ellis is not arriving at Hollywood as a newcomer. His novel American Psycho was adapted in 2000, and Less Than Zero received its own adaptation in 1987 – both landing during a period when Hollywood was actively circling the literary Brat Pack, the loose grouping of young American novelists who defined a certain brand of 1980s cultural dread. Those adaptations cemented Ellis’s reputation as the writer who could anatomize the unraveling of elite American life with something close to surgical indifference. The Shards returns him to that same decade fictionally, though the series arrives at a moment when that era’s aesthetics have cycled back into fashion in ways Ellis himself might find grimly amusing.
The show functions as a haute slasher – a genre designation that captures something real about its apparent tone. The trailer is sleek and unsettling in equal measure, the kind of production design that signals money spent on making decay look expensive. Whether that visual polish serves the material or softens it is one of the more interesting questions the series will have to answer.
The Cast, and What It Signals
Kaia Gerber leads the group of high school students, playing a mysterious class president whose position in the social hierarchy carries obvious dramatic weight. She’s joined by Evan Rachel Wood and theater producer Jordan Roth, who represent a different generational layer in the story. Among the younger cast is Homer Gere, whose surname will generate its own column inches regardless of his performance.
The casting choices do something interesting in aggregate – they mix established actors with newcomers and, yes, the children of famous people, in a show that is literally about the children of wealthy and powerful people navigating violence and identity. Whether that’s intentional irony or just the reality of how prestige television gets cast is probably both things at once.
For readers who came to The Shards when it was published in 2023, the adaptation raises the standard questions about translation. Ellis’s prose style is a specific instrument – flat, brand-saturated, deceptively affectless – and the degree to which a television series can preserve that quality, rather than converting it into conventional dramatic tension, will define whether this works as an Ellis story or simply as a well-produced thriller set during his period. Murphy’s track record with source material is uneven in ways that are genuinely interesting: he tends to amplify rather than replicate, which could work for Ellis or could sand off exactly the edges that make his fiction matter. The trailer, for what a trailer is worth, doesn’t fully answer that question. It does, however, look expensive and vaguely threatening, which is at least a start.
Ellis built his literary reputation on depicting a very specific American damage – the kind that wears good clothes, drives the right cars, and doesn’t register its own emptiness until something violent breaks through the surface. The Shards as a novel returned him to that territory with four decades of additional perspective on it. The FX series premieres with that same source material and a production apparatus around it that includes one of television’s most commercially successful showrunners. What remains to be seen is whether Murphy’s instinct to amplify can coexist with the particular quality that makes Ellis worth adapting in the first place – the silence inside the spectacle, the thing the characters don’t say while the camera lingers on what they’re wearing.
