If there was a Marvel Avengers of dead-eyed yuppie nihilism, then it is the alliance of author Bret Easton Ellis and television producer Ryan Murphy, who at last fulfil their shared destiny by joining forces on the tour de force of spiritually vacant neo-noir that is The Shards (Disney+ from Wednesday).It’s an absolute romp that plays like a greatest hits of two auteurs whose work has been powered by a lifelong fixation with youth, beauty and wealth – played out against a fantasy of 1980 Beverly Hills that lands like David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive crossed with a Ralph Lauren photo shoot.They also both love America’s dark history of serial killers: Ellis gave us the definitive fictional icon of the genre in American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman; while Murphy disgusted right-thinking people everywhere with his Netflix retelling of the deranged crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer. To be accused of bad taste is the highest compliment you could pay either. They’ve gone back to that old reliable of a slasher in our midst with The Shards, adapted from Ellis’s 2023 novel, which is, in itself, a sequel to his preppy 1985 masterpiece Less Than Zero. The 1980s have dawned, LA looks like something out of a retro video game, and 17-year-old “Ellis” (Igby Rigney, a stand in for the author) is a well-to-do Steve King obsessive dating the prettiest girl in his high school while living a secret gay life.He has also developed an obsession with an enigmatic new schoolmate, Robert (Homer Gere, son of Richard), who speeds around LA in a Porsche and whose arrival coincides with a horrific murder spree in Beverly Hills. To be gay in the early 1980s was to live in a constant paranoia about being outed – but Ellis believes that his overheated imagination is, for once, on to something: that Robert is connected with the killing.[ David Lynch’s Twin Peaks was a masterpiece. He forced us to look at the world in horrifying new waysOpens in new window ]So the plot is solid, but this series is really about the vibes. As per Murphy and Ellis’s aesthetic, the cast is uniformly good-looking in a bland and uninteresting way: they all look like the human equivalent of coltish thoroughbreds or hypercars driven by insecure middle-aged men. The soundtrack is, of course, an exemplary assemblage of new-age standards, while the show’s supersaturated colour scheme evokes early David Cronenberg movies, Tom Cruise’s Risky Business and the more bonkers segments of the same actor’s Cocktail (essentially a film about a serial killer where they didn’t show the bodies).Both Ellis and Murphy could do with a hit. Having scorched his initials into the American literary canon with Less Than Zero and American Psycho in the 1980s, Ellis has spent subsequent decades in the wilderness and was accused of descending into reactionary grumpy old man-dom with his 2019 non-fiction screed, White.Murphy’s fall has been arguably even more severe. He gave Disney+ its biggest smash with last year’s Love Story: John F Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette. But that was at the end of a dark descent that included not only the dire Dahmer and the equally tasteless The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story but also his atrocious Kim Kardashian legal drama All’s Fair. He and Ellis are redeemed with Shards, a show that is shallow but nonetheless creates quite a splash.