Ryan Murphy, director of the controversial Netflix true-crime Monster Anthology (2022-), and Bret Easton Ellis, literary provocateur and author of American Psycho (1991), seem the perfect match. Sure enough, Murphy’s new TV adaptation of Ellis’s 2023 novel, The Shards, for Disney is an exhilarating mix of teen drama, serial killer nail-biter and homoerotic cat-and-mouse thriller.

The Shards features a fictionalised version of Ellis himself (a standout performance by Igby Rigney). The show details the unravelling of a close-knit group of friends during their senior year at a private LA high school in 1981. It’s triggered by the simultaneous arrival of a charismatic and mysterious newcomer, Robert Mallory (Homer Gere, son of Richard Gere), and the terror and destruction wrought by a serial killer at large in the community dubbed “the Trawler”. Are these events coincidental? Or connected in some way?

Ellis has said that the appeal of his precocious first novel, Less Than Zero (1985) (which he was indeed working on in his senior year, as the series shows) was that it allowed viewers to imagine what it would be like to be a privileged youngster in cool, affluent Beverley Hills.

This TV incarnation of The Shards presents a particularly vivid version of this fantasy. The affluent teenagers pad around beautiful, empty houses, throw endless pool parties, drive through LA in........

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