The Shards

The Shards is beautifully curated, shot and scored.

When the series lets itself slide into the novel’s spirit of drifting anomie, all sensation and ironized reflection, it produces something vivid and memorable, despite the too-muchness.

As you might expect from the team-up of Ellis and Murphy, The Shards is as campy as the day is long. Even if it’s not as enticing or graphically violent as the book, the series proves that its driving creative forces are, in fact, a scintillating TV match made in hell.

It’s often absurd and always melodramatic — not in itself a criticism — but if you’re in the market for a slick miniseries about cocaine-sniffing kids (and adults), murder, animal mutilation, sex and sports cars in New Wave L.A., with cameos from Hamburger Hamlet and Orange Julius and an excellent selection of period songs on the soundtrack, you can’t do better than this.

Does it come together as anything harmonious? No. The second half of the season is chaos, but it breaks through what was stifling about the earlier chapters, and the cast benefits.

“The Shards” is more problematic: Mr. Ellis has been recycling his depraved teen angels long enough that the show, a collaboration with Ryan Murphy, becomes parody, even comedy.

Unlike American Psycho, Easton Ellis’s most famous output, there isn’t a shred of black humour. It also pales in comparison to Less Than Zero, its closest cousin and a novel which managed to write about bored characters without ever being boring.

Strong lead acting and an impeccable production design make up for The Shards flaws if aesthetics are important for you. A bit of a prue approach to the original source, and missing some paranoia, darkness and violence, but overall entertaining.

Interested in watching 10 impossibly dreary episodes of a bunch of humourless entitled teenagers dressed in school uniforms and Ralph Lauren with the mandatory cigarette (this is the 80's!) behave like adults? Nothing they do or say, or even the places they go to, are remotely attractive. Sometimes Bret Easton Ellis is better read than seen.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

WHY ARE MOVIES ABOUT HOMOSEXUALS TAKING OVER? THERE USED TO BE A FEW AND NOW ALWAYS SEE HIS GUYS POUNDING EACH OTHER FROM BEHIND OR SWAPPING SPIT IT’S TOO MUCH AND HERE WE GO WITH ANOTHER SHOW ABOUT GAY GUYS. WE GET IT HOLLYWOOD. WE GET IT. NOW MOVE THE FAK ALONG AND TRY AND MAKE SOME GOOD FEATURES AND TV SHOWS OR GO SHOW YOUR MOVIES ON GAY PORN HUB!!! not mainstream TV

Total failure. How could you make a thriller with good looking people in posh Beverly Hills BORING? Terrible writing. Acting beyond bad. No gorgeous homes.