The world can finally begin to hope again. It looks as though Ryan Murphy has pulled out of his dive and is beginning to find his glorious groove again. The uber-showrunner reached a nadir last year with All’s Fair, a legal drama that was so bad it was existentially awful, garnering a number of rare, zero-star reviews (including mine) and which has duly been commissioned for a second series.
But after All’s Fair came The Beauty. Which was chaotic and underdeveloped but fun. And then there was Love Story, about the short lives and love of JFK Jr and Carolyn Bessette, which was pitch-perfect, properly good trash. And now there is The Shards, Murphy’s adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s 80s-set metafictional/autobiographical novel of the same name. I have not read the book. An enfant terrible’s reminiscences are too often simply terrible and I was exhausted by the very idea. But a TV version? Run through the Murphytron? That sounds like a very good idea – and so it has proved. Theirs is a marriage made in pop-culture heaven.
