In November of 1987 I was nineteen years old and completely gone on Jami Gertz. She’d turned up in The Lost Boys that July, playing the girl who lures Jason Patric into that whole vampire mess, and by the time she showed up again a few months later as Blair in Less Than Zero, the thing was settled as far as I was concerned. I don’t remember much about the plot of that movie now, and I’ve since learned that the author of the book it was based on, Bret Easton Ellis, loathed it, but I remember her. I remember Robert Downey Jr. falling apart in a way that seemed glamorous at the time and looks like something else entirely in 2026. And I remember Andrew McCarthy standing in the middle of all that decadence looking mildly concerned about it, which was pretty much what Andrew McCarthy was for.
That was the last gasp of the Brat Pack thing, the McCarthys and the Ringwalds, and for a kid in the deep south whose idea of glamour was the Sherman Oaks Galleria as filtered through a movie screen, those films were a window into a life I was never going to have. I was twelve in 1981, the year The Shards takes place. The rich Los Angeles kids in that show were doing cocaine at homecoming while I was riding my bike to the Kwik Sak. So I’ve spent forty years looking at that world the way you look at somebody else’s vacation slides, with a mix of envy and relief that I never had to live it.
All of which is a long way of saying I came to FX’s The Shards with a lot of baggage, and it earned every bit of it.
If you’re wondering how the new show connects to the old movie, here’s the short version. Ellis wrote Less Than Zero in 1985 when he was barely out of his teens, went on to write American Psycho, and has spent the forty years since being reliably irritating in public. The Shards is his 2023 novel, and in it, Bret is a fictionalized Bret Easton Ellis, seventeen years old, in his senior year at the Buckley School in Sherman Oaks, writing the novel that will become Less Than Zero. So Bret is the guy who invents Clay. Clay is the guy Andrew McCarthy plays. If you’re watching this show and thinking that Igby Rigney looks like a proto-McCarthy, you’ve got the lineage right, and the show wants you to get it.
But there’s a wrinkle that makes the whole thing better. In The Shards, Bret is closeted. He has a girlfriend, Debbie, and their relationship is largely maintenance work on the version of himself he needs the school to believe in, while his actual life is happening with the class stoner Matt and a classmate named Ryan who’s quietly appearing in porn videos. Clay, in the 1987 movie, is straight, with Blair as the ex he’s trying to get back. That’s the Clay most of us remember.
Clay in Ellis’s actual novel is a considerably murkier proposition, with encounters both ways and no particular interest in labeling any of it. 20th Century Fox looked at that and decided audiences needed someone wholesome to follow through the wreckage, so they straightened Clay out, gave him a mission to save Julian, and turned Blair into a love interest. Knowing that, watching The Shards becomes an odd little pleasure. You’re watching a kid who can’t say what he is out loud start writing a character who ended up saying it for him, right up until Hollywood took the pen away.
Now the review part.
The Shards is the best thing Ryan Murphy, the man who gave us Glee and American Horror Story, has made for television since the first season of AHS, and I say that as somebody who checked out on him somewhere around season four. A few critics have gotten there ahead of me, calling it one of the best adaptations of the year and ranking it among Murphy’s finest work. They’re right, and the 52% it’s currently carrying on Rotten Tomatoes is going to look pretty silly in about five years.
Rigney, who came up through Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass and The Fall of the House of Usher, is the reason it works. Bret narrates the series in a voice that’s arch and cool, which is exactly how a seventeen-year-old aspiring novelist would narrate his own life, and Rigney manages the trick of holding the character just out of reach while still making you need to know what happens to him. There are two performances happening at once, the confident straight kid Bret is selling to the school and the scared, self-serving one underneath, and he plays them simultaneously without ever winking about it. Homer Gere, son of Richard Gere and Carey Lowell, plays the transfer student Robert Mallory who may or may not be the serial killer stalking the Valley, and he gives the show its engine. Bret spots him at a matinee of The Shining in 1980, Robert flatly denies ever having been there or having seen the film, and everything that follows spins out of that one lie.
The kids around them are where Murphy’s real gift for casting shows up. Kaia Gerber, Cindy Crawford’s daughter, finally has a part with something behind the surface and she finds it. (Crawford and Richard Gere were married to each other once, so the two young leads have a family history nobody could have scripted.)
Kaia Gerber could pass for Jami Gertz in 1987, dark hair and cheekbones and impossibly hot like most of the cast, and I have to think somebody in casting knew exactly what they were doing. She isn’t playing Blair. Blair doesn’t exist yet, because Bret is still writing her. The face just shows up a year early.
Hayes Warner, a pop singer making her television debut, takes Debbie, who could easily have been nothing but a spoiled brat, and finds what it does to a girl to know she’s the runner-up in every room she enters. Graham Campbell, also new to television after a run in the Broadway production of Appropriate, plays the friendly quarterback Thom in a way that gets genuinely unnerving as the season moves.
The adults are the rot underneath. Wes Bentley, the kid who filmed the plastic bag in American Beauty and later spent five seasons as Jamie Dutton on Yellowstone, plays Debbie’s Oscar-winning producer father as a man who invites teenage boys into his hot tub and talks vaguely about what he could do for their careers, and he’s unsettling in a way that maps onto about forty years of what we now know about that town. Evan Rachel Wood, of Thirteen and Westworld, is his wife, a bitter woman who never got her own shot and makes sure her daughter feels it. And Jordan Roth, the Tony-winning Broadway producer who owns five theaters on 42nd Street, makes his acting debut as the producer’s assistant and walks off with entire scenes on nothing but a whisper and a pause.
The 1981 of it all is handled with real care. Most of the period music plays inside the story rather than getting laid over the top of it, starting with Ultravox’s “Vienna” coming out of a car stereo and the Human League’s ‘Don’t You Want Me’ playing at a pool party, which is the kind of detail the show gets right. Satanic cults get a passing mention in the news. AIDS hasn’t been named yet, but the first reports had started that summer, and the show lets that sit in the background without underlining it. Murphy has said 1981 was the most important year of his life, that he was sixteen and got his license that year, and you can feel a man reconstructing his own adolescence with a level of attention he’d never spend on somebody else’s.
The complaints are mostly about pacing, that the show wanders into side plots and lingers where a tighter series would cut. I’d argue the wandering is the point. The observation that stuck with me most is that The Shards would still work with the serial murders taken out entirely. The murders aren’t what’s holding your attention. They work as pressure on a group of kids who’ve each built a version of themselves that doesn’t survive contact with anything real, and watching those versions crack is the actual show.
Nine episodes, finale on September 9. It ends on a cliffhanger, which is the whole gamble on a season two nobody has ordered yet.
Here’s what I keep coming back to. In 1987 I sat in a theater and watched a sanded-down, studio-approved version of a story, and I had no idea anything had been sanded. I thought I was watching the thing itself. Nobody tells a nineteen-year-old in a small southern town that the movie he’s watching had its edges filed off before it ever got to him. It took me most of a lifetime and a television show to find out what I’d actually been handed.
The good news is that Ellis got to go back and write the version with the edges on, and Murphy got to shoot it. That almost never happens. Most of us don’t get a do-over on the story we told about ourselves at seventeen.
I still think Jami Gertz was the most beautiful woman in that movie. Some things a person doesn’t need to revise.
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