Ryan Murphy is heading back to the dark side of desire with The Shards, a seductive new thriller adapted from the bestselling novel by Bret Easton Ellis.
The first official trailer introduces a world of beautiful teenagers, enormous houses, expensive cars, secret relationships and increasingly gruesome violence.
It also makes something important clear almost immediately.
The queer sexuality at the heart of Ellis’s novel does not appear to have been removed or softened for television.
The trailer includes a brief same-sex encounter while teasing the complicated web of attraction, secrecy and obsession surrounding its central character.
Igby Rigney stars as Bret, a fictionalized teenage version of Ellis during his senior year at an elite Los Angeles prep school in 1981 (Hollywood Reporter).
Bret is an aspiring writer who appears to move comfortably through a privileged social world populated by wealthy, beautiful and emotionally detached friends.
Behind that carefully maintained image, however, he is concealing a major part of himself.
Bret publicly dates his girlfriend Debbie while secretly pursuing sexual encounters with other boys.
That divided existence is not merely a side story within the original novel.
It shapes the way Bret observes his friends, constructs stories about them and struggles to determine whether his own perceptions can be trusted.
The arrival of handsome new student Robert Mallory pushes that uncertainty into dangerous territory.
Robert is played by Homer Gere, the son of actor Richard Gere, in his first major leading role.
Robert quickly charms Bret’s friends, but Bret becomes convinced that something disturbing lies behind his polished appearance.
At the same time, a serial killer known as the Trawler is terrorizing Los Angeles and targeting young people with increasingly grotesque acts of violence.
Bret begins to suspect that Robert may somehow be connected to the murders.
His obsession is complicated by the fact that suspicion is not the only thing drawing him toward the mysterious newcomer.
In Ellis’s novel, Bret’s feelings about Robert blur attraction, envy, jealousy, fear and paranoia until it becomes difficult to separate genuine danger from frustrated desire.
The result is a distinctly queer psychological thriller rather than a conventional story about catching a killer.
Bret is trying to understand Robert while still lacking the freedom and emotional vocabulary to understand himself.
His clandestine encounters with other boys offer moments of excitement and connection, but they are also shaped by secrecy and the expectations of an environment in which heterosexuality must be publicly performed.
The book explores the loneliness of searching for other gay boys without being able to acknowledge openly what that search means.
It also examines how repression can distort desire and turn an ordinary attraction into something obsessive, frightening or impossible to control.
That queer conflict appears likely to remain central to Murphy’s television adaptation.
The new trailer moves rapidly between parties, drugs, intimate encounters, whispered suspicions and flashes of bloody violence.
Its characters are presented as both desirable and potentially dangerous, with almost every relationship concealing something beneath its glamorous surface.
Kaia Gerber plays Susan Reynolds, one of Bret’s closest friends, while Hayes Warner appears as Debbie Schaffer and Graham Campbell plays popular athlete Thom Wright.
The adult cast includes Wes Bentley, Evan Rachel Wood and Broadway producer and actor Jordan Roth.
Murphy has described the story as one filled with formative experiences, from first kisses and first heartbreaks to the considerably darker experience of a first murder.
That combination makes The Shards difficult to place inside a single genre.
It is part gay coming-of-age drama, part erotic thriller, part nostalgic portrait of Los Angeles and part slasher mystery.
The source novel is also a deliberately unstable mixture of fiction and autobiography.
Ellis uses his own name and elements of his youth while constructing a story whose murders, conspiracies and shifting explanations continually challenge the reader’s trust.
Bret is not simply investigating a mystery because he is also creating one, both as the narrator of the story and as the future novelist he is becoming.
That unreliability could make the television adaptation particularly compelling.
Viewers may spend the series wondering whether Robert is genuinely dangerous, whether Bret is allowing attraction to become paranoia or whether the truth is even darker than either possibility.
The trailer offers no easy answers, but it does promise that queer desire will remain visible within the mystery.
For gay viewers, that may be the most intriguing element of the adaptation.
This is not a story in which sexuality is added around the edges to give an otherwise conventional thriller some contemporary relevance.
Bret’s hidden desires, his performance of heterosexuality and his inability to reconcile attraction with suspicion are fundamental to the tension.
The killer may be the most obvious danger in The Shards, but the secrets these characters keep from one another may ultimately prove just as destructive.
The Shards premieres August 5 on FX and will also stream on Hulu in the United States.
📷 FX