The Shards on Disney+ review: Watchable and dreamily shallow but lacks suspense

Bret Easton Ellis’s novels have been notoriously hard to adapt. Satirical, graphic, tonally tricky — ice-cool, self-conscious, wickedly funny — only the film version of American Psycho has had any lasting impact and it needed to adopt a lightly comedic take to do so, completely missing the chilling depiction of the hell at the end of America’s Me decades. Now though, it seems the world has shifted into a sufficiently dark and decadent era for Ellis to feel relevant (lifestyle over lives, people as fodder to exploit). A new Psycho film is being made with Luca Guadagnino at the helm, and ahead of it comes The Shards on Disney/FX, an adaptation of Ellis’s last novel, a meta teen horror about him writing his first novel Last Than Zero in 1981, while he and his similarly rich kid Hollywood friends are under threat from a serial killer called The Trawler, who likes to graft pets onto the bodies of his victims. Created by Ryan “American Horror Story” Murphy — and co-written by him and Ellis — it has an alluringly attractive production design and an admirable cast of sexy/creepy actors: Igby Rigney nails the rising panic of the dissociated bisexual Bret, while Homer Gere (Richard’s son) is frighteningly smooth as Robert Mallory, whose appearance in school coincides with the student disappearances. The timing of the series feels right: part-Euphoria in its sex and drugs teen milieu (though weirdly chaste, in Murphy’s usual fashion), part-Once Upon a Time In Hollywood, with Manson references, and part-Heated Rivalry with its bland magazine eroticism. In fact, Murphy, forever style over content, is perfectly suited to this material: this is a watchable, dreamily shallow series about watchable, dreamily shallow kids, made by a watchable, dreamily shallow creator, which occasionally delivers on the horror. Suspense though? Sadly not, and that’s the real measure of excellence.