The First Trailer For “The Shards” Is Full Of Nepo Babies, A Serial Killer And Gay Secrets
The first trailer for The Shards has landed, and it is exactly the kind of beautiful, sordid mess you would expect when Ryan Murphy and Bret Easton Ellis finally join forces. The 10-episode thriller premieres on 5 August on FX and streams the same day on Hulu, opening with a two-part premiere before new episodes drop weekly.
The Shards adapts Ellis’s auto-fiction novel, very loosely based on his own teenage years in Los Angeles. The year is 1981. Igby Rigney plays a 17-year-old version of Bret, an aspiring screenwriter starting his senior year at the elite Buckley prep school.
His friends are the rich, glossy set everyone wants to be near, or be: girlfriend Debbie (pop singer Hayes Warner), whose producer father could hand him a Hollywood break, plus homecoming royalty Thom (Graham Campbell) and Susan (Kaia Gerber).
Then the mood turns. A serial killer the press has dubbed The Trawler is working through the city, playing mind games with teenage victims before killing them. When a magnetic new student called Robert Mallory (Homer Gere) slides into the group, Bret becomes convinced the newcomer and the killer are the same person. Paranoia, or is he onto something?
Yes, It’s Very Gay
This is a Murphy show, so the queerness is not subtext. Under all the money and dread, Bret is quietly working out his sexuality, sleeping with a few male classmates while Debbie has no idea.
The trailer only teases that thread, but the novel does not hold back, and neither does Murphy as a rule.
We already ran the rule over the three new leading men, Igby Rigney, Homer Gere and Graham Campbell, when the casting first landed. Around them sits a stacked ensemble: Evan Rachel Wood, Wes Bentley, Owen Painter, Daniel Dale and Broadway producer Jordan Roth.
Ellis is on board as an executive producer and co-writer on several episodes, so the book’s nastier instincts should survive the trip to television.
The sound should match the look. Alongside the expected 80s needle-drops, the series features original music from Troye Sivan and Leland. For a lot of us, that alone is reason enough to press play.
The story took a slow road to the screen. Ellis first released it as a serialised audiobook on his podcast between 2020 and 2021, then published the novel in early 2023. HBO once held the rights with Luca Guadagnino attached to direct, but that version fell apart before the project found a home at FX.
Now it finally has a date. International viewers can catch it on Disney+ from the same week.
