What Is ‘The Shards’ Based on? All About the Fictionalized Memoir Behind FX’s New Thriller

A new Ryan Murphy show has entered the chat. The Shards premieres August 5 on FX and Hulu, and features a buzzy cast including Kaia Gerber and Homer Gere (whose parents used to be married in real life, by the way). Set in Los Angeles in the early ’80s, the thriller focuses on Bret Easton Ellis and the nepobabies populating his ritzy high school, whose lives are disrupted by the arrival of new student Robert Mallory and the mysterious identity of a serial killer called The Trawler.If the name Bret Easton Ellis sounds familiar, that’s because he’s the author behind American Psycho and The Rules of Attraction, and also wrote the screenplay for The Canyons and Smiley Face Killers. Bret notably went to Bennington College in Vermont, where he met and became close to fellow famous authors Donna Tartt and Jonathan Lethem.The Shards was published just a few years ago in 2023, and is a fictionalized memoir about his final year of high school.“I was going online and I started looking for classmates that I had started to think about and I couldn’t find them,” Bret told i-D. “I wanted so badly to find out what was going on in their lives, what was happening to them, and then I started thinking about the last year of high school. Then I started listening to all the music from that year. I started looking for all the places where we hung out (they’re all gone). I had a profound wave of nostalgia for that time. I started writing the book that night, and the next day I had 14 pages. It happened very quickly.”Is The School from The Shards Real?Yep! Bret went to the Buckley School in Sherman Oaks, and—much like in the show/book—the student body historically includes kids of famous celebrities and major Hollywood players. Alumni include Paris Hilton, Paul Thomas Anderson, Laura Dern, Kim Kardashian, Nicole Richie, Matthew Perry, and Alyssa Milano.Add Cosmopolitan as a preferred source in your Google search results.Use your Google account to add this to your settings.Leonardo Cendamo//Getty ImagesAs for what Bret’s classmates think of the book, he told Vanity Fair, “I did get a, I guess it was through Facebook, a Facebook message saying, ‘Of all the names you could have chosen, the name I hate the most is Debbie.’ I got that, and then I went back to her and said, ‘I hope you enjoyed my fictional imagining of our senior year.’ And she wrote back a wink sign or whatever. Haven’t spoken to her in decades and decades and decades.”Was The Trawler a Real Serial Killer?Fortunately, nope: The Trawler is an entirely fictional killer. As Vanity Fair put it, “searching ‘the Trawler’ in the archives of the Los Angeles Times will bring you to a whole lot of stories about fishing boats.”Who Plays Bret in The Shards? That’d be Igby Rigney, who also narrates the show in Bret’s voice. “I think Ryan Murphy was a huge guide in that and we spent a lot, a lot of time on figuring out the voiceover and the tone of the voiceover,” Rigney told Decider. “Obviously Bret’s book and his narration is so iconic. And I really wanted to respect how important that was. But yeah, we spent a lot of time in post figuring that out and figuring out, you know, how is this going to read?”The Shards drops tonight (August 5). Watch it on FX or Hulu!