A Serial-Killer Show That Doubles as a Confession
Ryan Murphy’s The Shards is a 1980s psychological thriller series, adapted from Bret Easton Ellis’s semi-autobiographical novel, that follows a privileged, closeted teen convinced a charming new classmate may be a serial killer while the looming AIDS epidemic quietly reshapes his world. This is not Murphy’s flashiest project; it is his most exposed. The showrunner, who grew up devouring Ellis’s work, seized on this Bret Easton Ellis adaptation because its time period, characters and subject matter matched his own memories of being a queer teen in the early 80s. In doing so, he has made what feels like his first thriller that is also a veiled memoir. The tension between slick genre fun and private grief gives Ryan Murphy The Shards a charge missing from his recent, more mechanical series.
Turning Ellis’s Autofiction into a Prestige 1980s Psychological Thriller
Ellis’s novel, published in 2023, is autofiction that returns to Los Angeles in 1981 and installs a teenage version of himself—17-year-old Bret at the elite Buckley School—as narrator and unreliable hero. Murphy’s adaptation keeps that spine but tightens it into a stylish thriller about desire, privilege and paranoia. The plot is deliciously pulpy: Bret believes Robert Mallory, the hypnotic new student, might be the Trawler, a killer abducting and mutilating young people across the city. Yet the more compelling mystery is psychological. Is Robert a monster, or a projection born from Bret’s closeted hunger and fear? Murphy, less interested in Ellis’s ambiguity than in dramatic payoff, pushes events forward, but the show still uses the serial-killer premise to expose how wealthy teens move through a world where parents are absent, boundaries dissolve and every crush carries a threat.
Luxury, Sex, and Death: Murphy’s Most Controlled Excess
The Shards looks exactly like the platonic ideal of a Ryan Murphy series. There are spectacular houses, extremely wealthy teenagers, early-1980s Los Angeles, sex, drugs, closeted homosexuality, dangerously beautiful people and graphic violence, all staged with meticulous period detail. The sea of Gucci loafers, Ralph Lauren shirts and Calvin Klein everything else floats under a permanently azure sky, while the series is “beautifully curated, shot and scored.” The soundtrack blends contemporary bangers with songs written by Troye Sivan, who evokes an era nearly two decades before his birth and adds a layer of melancholy. This is Murphy’s signature visual storytelling at its best: every frame is glossy, every musical cue considered. Yet for once, the style serves the story rather than smothering it. The luxe aesthetics make the teenagers’ freedom look enviable before revealing it as a form of abandonment, where missing kids can go unnoticed and horror seeps in through unlocked gates.
The Trawler, AIDS, and the Trauma Murphy Thought He’d Buried
From the opening monologue—“Kids today have it fucking easy”—Murphy frames the 80s as a decade when teenagers battled serial killers and something far worse: the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In the series, Los Angeles is terrorized by the Trawler, who invades homes, abducts youths and returns their mutilated bodies. But Murphy has said he was writing to the specter of AIDS, a threat more deadly than any slasher, which his generation faced at the same age as Bret. The Shards also tackles the epidemic directly enough to leave Murphy shaken; he admitted he was “shocked” by how emotional he became on set and that the project unearthed PTSD so intense he returned to therapy. This is an AIDS epidemic drama smuggled inside a teen thriller, and that fusion makes the show feel like Murphy’s most personal work. The Trawler haunts the characters’ bodies; AIDS haunts their futures.
A Multi-Season Coming-of-Age in the Shadow of a Plague
Murphy has avoided serious teen stories set in the 1980s because that decade was bound up with the early AIDS crisis for him, but The Shards forces him back into that emotional minefield. He has even said he had never done a work about his own childhood—first kiss, failed driving test, first dance—until now. According to Murphy, “Bret always had imagined, in success, that the book could be three seasons of television because there’s a lot in there.” Season 1 captures the beginning of the characters’ innocence, while planned Seasons 2 and 3 would confront the AIDS specter more directly. That ambition matters. It suggests The Shards is not a one-off stylistic exercise but the opening movement of Murphy’s long-delayed reckoning with the friends he lost and the life he kept. If he follows through, Ryan Murphy The Shards could stand as his definitive statement on how queer youth, privilege and horror collided in the early 80s.
