{"id":584355,"date":"2026-08-05T21:56:11","date_gmt":"2026-08-05T21:56:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/584355\/"},"modified":"2026-08-05T21:56:11","modified_gmt":"2026-08-05T21:56:11","slug":"the-shards-on-disney-romp-of-a-slasher-adapted-from-bret-easton-ellis-novel-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/584355\/","title":{"rendered":"The Shards on Disney+: Romp of a slasher adapted from Bret Easton Ellis novel \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

If there was a Marvel Avengers of dead-eyed yuppie nihilism, then it is the alliance of author Bret Easton Ellis<\/a> and television producer Ryan Murphy, who at last fulfil their shared destiny by joining forces on the tour de force of spiritually vacant neo-noir that is The Shards (Disney+<\/a> from Wednesday).<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an absolute romp that plays like a greatest hits of two auteurs whose work has been powered by a lifelong fixation with youth, beauty and wealth \u2013 played out against a fantasy of 1980 Beverly Hills that lands like David Lynch\u2019s Mulholland Drive crossed with a Ralph Lauren photo shoot.<\/p>\n

They also both love America\u2019s dark history of serial killers: Ellis gave us the definitive fictional icon of the genre in American Psycho\u2019s Patrick Bateman; while Murphy disgusted right-thinking people everywhere with his Netflix <\/a>retelling of the deranged crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer. To be accused of bad taste is the highest compliment you could pay either. <\/p>\n

They\u2019ve gone back to that old reliable of a slasher in our midst with The Shards, adapted from Ellis\u2019s 2023 novel, which is, in itself, a sequel to his preppy 1985 masterpiece Less Than Zero. The 1980s have dawned, LA looks like something out of a retro video game, and 17-year-old \u201cEllis\u201d (Igby Rigney, a stand in for the author) is a well-to-do Steve King obsessive dating the prettiest girl in his high school while living a secret gay life.<\/p>\n

He has also developed an obsession with an enigmatic new schoolmate, Robert (Homer Gere, son of Richard), who speeds around LA in a Porsche and whose arrival coincides with a horrific murder spree in Beverly Hills. To be gay in the early 1980s was to live in a constant paranoia about being outed \u2013 but Ellis believes that his overheated imagination is, for once, on to something: that Robert is connected with the killing.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0David Lynch\u2019s Twin Peaks was a masterpiece. He forced us to look at the world in horrifying new waysOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

So the plot is solid, but this series is really about the vibes. As per Murphy and Ellis\u2019s aesthetic, the cast is uniformly good-looking in a bland and uninteresting way: they all look like the human equivalent of coltish thoroughbreds or hypercars driven by insecure middle-aged men. The soundtrack is, of course, an exemplary assemblage of new-age standards, while the show\u2019s supersaturated colour scheme evokes early David Cronenberg movies, Tom Cruise\u2019s Risky Business and the more bonkers segments of the same actor\u2019s Cocktail (essentially a film about a serial killer where they didn\u2019t show the bodies).<\/p>\n

Both Ellis and Murphy could do with a hit. Having scorched his initials into the American literary canon with Less Than Zero and American Psycho in the 1980s, Ellis has spent subsequent decades in the wilderness and was accused of descending into reactionary grumpy old man-dom with his 2019 non-fiction screed, White.<\/p>\n

Murphy\u2019s fall has been arguably even more severe. He gave Disney+ its biggest smash with last year\u2019s Love Story: John F Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette. But that was at the end of a dark descent that included not only the dire Dahmer and the equally tasteless The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story but also his atrocious Kim Kardashian legal drama All\u2019s Fair. He and Ellis are redeemed with Shards, a show that is shallow but nonetheless creates quite a splash. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If there was a Marvel Avengers of dead-eyed yuppie nihilism, then it is the alliance of author Bret…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":584356,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[20055,10450,93,61,60,1868],"class_list":["post-584355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-david-lynch","tag-disney-plus","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-netflix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=584355"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584355\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/584356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=584355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=584355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=584355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}