The Shards Invites You to Sit With the Cool Kids, or Else!

The year is 1981, and in Los Angeles, California, teens are hotter and meaner than they’ve ever been. So goes the premise of FX and FX on Hulu’s The Shards, the television adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s 2023 novel of the same name. Created by Ellis and Ryan Murphy, The Shards is loosely based on Ellis’s own high-school years at an elite private school, going so far as to have the central character be named, well, Bret Easton Ellis. The Shards imagines that Ellis’s cool-kid clique — replete with a very ’80s-looking Kaia Gerber — gets upended by the arrival of a new student named Robert. There’s also a serial killer named the Trawler who targets teen girls making the rounds. Could these two perhaps be one in the same? Forget it, Jake. It’s The Shards.

Most of what we’ve known about The Shards series is that it stars two guys named Igby Rigney and Homer James Jigme Gere — names that are fun to say — but now that we have a fuller picture, it’s clear that Ellis and Murphy are kind of a match made in heaven for material like this. It’s great to see Murphy back in high school, so to speak, with more of the edge that’s set his recent shows apart. The show looks both stylish and cutting, with everyone’s prep-school uniform somehow perfectly tailored to them. These teens are scary whether or not they’re also murderers, indulging very teenlike activities like recreational drug use, driving around in cool cars, and going to restaurants to complain about each other. Here’s hoping that no matter how popular these prep-school kids are, they can figure out what the deal with the Trawler is and make it to finals week.