{"id":869537,"date":"2026-10-03T16:10:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-03T16:10:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/869537\/"},"modified":"2026-10-03T16:10:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-03T16:10:08","slug":"the-shards-season-two-fx-show-tests-ryan-murphys-sway-at-disney","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/869537\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The Shards’ Season Two? FX Show Tests Ryan Murphy’s Sway at Disney"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tAs The Shards<\/a> hit screens in early August, Ryan Murphy<\/a> spoke about how he and author Bret Easton Ellis saw the series potentially running for several seasons.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt will have to get to season two first \u2014 and on that front, The Shards remains in limbo.<\/p>\n

\n\tThree-plus weeks out from the season finale, which ended on a sizable cliffhanger, there\u2019s been no word from FX on the show\u2019s status. That\u2019s not necessarily a bad sign: The Disney-owned outlet has been known to take its time on renewal decisions. Pickups for Adults and The Lowdown, to name two recent critically acclaimed shows, came months after their first seasons ended.<\/p>\n

\n\tFX and Murphy also seem to have an understanding that when he\u2019s ready with an idea, they\u2019re ready to back it. Two-plus years passed between the last season of American Horror Story and the one that premiered Sept. 24. There was a nearly seven-year gap between seasons one and two of Feud.<\/p>\n

\n\tThose are anthology series, however, and one season doesn\u2019t necessarily flow directly from the previous one (the large pile-up of AHS lore aside). The Shards is intended as an ongoing show, following the same set of characters over a long time.<\/p>\n

\n\tMurphy has also spoken about how much he personally connected to The Shards, even though Ellis\u2019 novel \u2014 about a group of L.A. prep school kids in the early \u201980s and a possible serial killer in their midst \u2014 is semi-autobiographical (not the serial killer parts, obviously).<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cMy pitch to him was that 1981, the year the book is set, was the most important year of my life in many ways,\u201d Murphy told<\/a> The Hollywood Reporter about how he sold Ellis on working together. \u201cThat was the year I turned 16. That was my first date. My first driving lesson. I lost my virginity. On and on and on. I really understood those kids, and particularly, the Bret character.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tCompounding the mystery is the fact that no one outside of Disney really knows how well The Shards performed for FX and Hulu. Linear ratings were small \u2014 an average of 237,000 viewers for initial airings on FX \u2014 but that\u2019s par for the course for a scripted cable series now. A great majority of the show\u2019s audience will come from streaming, but The Shards never made Nielsen\u2019s streaming top 10s and FX hasn\u2019t released any of its own data. Neither of those facts is out of the ordinary either: Most FX shows don\u2019t break into the streaming charts, and the outlet rarely does ratings PR.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Shards is also the second Murphy-produced FX show this year to end on a cliffhanger and not (as yet) be picked up. The Beauty wrapped its season in early March with a lot of loose threads; in July, the show\u2019s cast was released. (Love Story, which FX did point to as a ratings success, also hasn\u2019t been renewed, but it may fall under the aforementioned \u201cwhen the right idea hits\u201d plan for Murphy\u2019s anthologies.)<\/p>\n

\n\tMurphy has a big overall deal with Disney\u2019s 20th Television and a long working relationship with both the studio and FX \u2014 even when he was based at Netflix, his 20th-produced shows continued to churn out new seasons. If The Shards does get a second season, it may be a testament to those relationships more so than the validation of a big hit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As The Shards hit screens in early August, Ryan Murphy spoke about how he and author Bret Easton…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":869538,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[88,11494,247476,92],"class_list":["post-869537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-ryan-murphy","tag-the-shards","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/869537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=869537"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/869537\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/869538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=869537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=869537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=869537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}