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.
We open in the 1980s with a laconic voiceover from our main man, Bret (Igby Rigney, still a little rough in places, but he nevertheless does great work here, allowing just enough glimpses of the roiling emotion beneath the shiny, protective carapace to keep Ellis’s avatar recognisably human). He is sketching out the immediate future for him and his select, gilded group of high school friends. “A season of horror and murder that would destroy us all.” Think Gatsby with quaaludes, settle back and enjoy.
Metafiction demands meta-commentary, so Murphy has stuffed the cast with the offspring of 80s icons – most notably Kaia Gerber (the absolute image of her supermodel mother, Cindy Crawford) and Homer Gere (son of Richard and Carey Lowell), both of whom acquit themselves very well. Gerber is straight-A student and class president Susan, the childhood friend with whom Bret is in love, despite his girlfriend Debbie (Hayes Warner) and his assorted secret boyfriends and Susan’s own long-term boyfriend, Thom (Graham Campbell). Gere is Robert, the beautiful, troubled new boy who looks set to shatter their charmed circle. “He was a virus,” Bret’s voiceover tells us, as Robert starts gaslighting him and befriending all the young men Bret has recently had sex with, “who was going to invade and destroy the school and me.”
It is the 80s, it is Los Angeles and so, as well as metaphors for the coming Aids epidemic, there is a literal killer at work. Young women get heavy-breather phone calls, go missing and then turn up horribly mutilated and deeply dead. By the time the third victim is found, the serial killer has been nicknamed the Trawler and bloody pentagrams are appearing on doors and in homes, leading to the city living in fear. Bret keeps a knife by his typewriter as he works on his first novel late into the night.
The Trawler moves on to young male victims. When one of Bret’s former secrets, Matt Kellner, accuses Bret of repeatedly calling him and messing with his home while he is out, even darker suspicions of Robert begin to form in our otherwise disaffected hero’s mind. Then he gets a phone call himself, and hears the sounds of Matt being tortured to death.
The Shards is beautifully curated, shot and scored. The sea of Gucci loafers, Ralph Lauren shirts and Calvin Klein everything elses ebbs and flows under a permanently azure sky. And the soundtrack is either contemporary bangers or specially written for the occasion by Troye Sivan, who is by some sorcery able to evoke a time nearly two decades before he was born with precision and then add some heartfelt melancholy for it, too.
Perhaps it’s this that marks out The Shards as a true return to form for Murphy. Nostalgia is not just memory of times past – it’s a yearning for it, too, and this time he captures both. The serial killer storyline pulls the story along, but its heart is in the longing for an era gone by, for youth flown, even with all its sorrows and insecurities. When drugs and sex were novelties still, part of a process of discovery rather than avoidance, and it felt – before viruses, the internet, climate change and all the other infinite horrors – like anything was possible. Shards of hope.
-
The Shards is on Disney+
