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If you happen to be a fan of Bret Easton Ellis’ novel The Shards, then the first two episodes of Ryan Murphy‘s adaptation for FX will be reassuringly familiar. Like the book, the TV show is told in first-person narration by a character named Bret Ellis, who looks back to Sherman Oaks in 1981 and his senior year at Buckley. Like the book, Bret is living a double life, dating a girl in public while secretly sleeping with a boy. Like the book, there’s a fateful meeting with the mysterious Robert Mallory at a movie theater in Westwood. And, yes, like the book, the serial killer known as the Trawler is stalking teenagers across Los Angeles.
Episodes three through six, though? Let’s just say Murphy takes Ellis’ story in his own gleefully off-the-wall direction, with a newly added porn industry subplot and even a musical interlude on an American Bandstand-like TV show.
Here’s how that happened. Those first two episodes were written by Ellis years before Murphy got involved, back when The Shards was being developed by HBO. The streamer picked up the rights before the novel had even been published — indeed, before it had been finished — while Ellis was still releasing the story as weekly audio installments on his podcast in 2020 and 2021. Sources say HBO at one point was contemplating a budget north of $100 million for the project. The network had high hopes for Ellis, too, installing him as the show’s sole writer and executive producer.
