How ‘The Shards’ Rethinks the TV Serial Killer
Some stories refuse to stay on the page. The Hollywood Reporter’s Beyond the Book column explores what happens when books make the leap to screen and beyond — unpacking what stayed, changed, how it was done and why it matters with the creatives who made it.
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For almost two decades, I believed the closest I’d ever get to the life of Bret Easton Ellis was living in the Bennington College dorm where he worked on novels like Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction. Then came The Shards.
The 2023 young adult novel turned FX series is, similar to his previous work, told through a self-aware narrator, authorial avatar Bret Easton Ellis (Igby Rigney). It’s 1981, and the 17-year-old promising writer is in the throes of his senior year at a private Los Angeles college preparatory school when Robert Mallory (Homer Gere), a charming and secretive newcomer, arrives. The closeted teen can’t decide whether he wants to be Robert or be with him, but regardless, the timing of Robert’s emergence feels too coincidental to an increasingly paranoid Bret.
Robert’s not just dangerous because he challenges Bret’s place in their inner social circle, or quickly clocks Bret’s sexuality, something the fledgling writer is not yet open about amid a time of pervasive homophobia. It’s how Robert’s arrival coincides with that of the Trawler, a serial killer murdering young people around L.A. Ellis is no stranger to telling stories about serial murderers, but for me, this felt different. Especially after discovering a real killer roved L.A. during the American Psycho scribe’s last year of high school.
Between 1981 and 1983, the “West Side Rapist” murdered at least 12 women living in the neighborhood around his Hollywood apartment. The killer, who was admitted to a psychiatric institution just like Robert, is never explicitly mentioned in The Shards. But he lends Ellis’ story a certain authenticity, particularly to someone who had their own coming-of-age killer. In the fall of 2009, during my first months of college, a Cleveland man was arrested for the murder of at least 11 women, horrific crimes he committed a few miles from my home over the span of my last two years of high school.
Having semi-proximity to these kinds of events can create psychogenic connections to them. But the victims’ stories aren’t ours, nor are they others’ to tell, something Ellis — and now Monster co-creator Murphy — is refreshingly uninterested in. In both the book and show, the Trawler’s victims are a completely different demographic than the one stalking L.A. during Ellis’ youth, and the killer is never identified. As a result, this monster feels asmetaphoricalas he is tangible — a device for exploring everything from repressed sexuality to the dark underbelly of ‘80s L.A.
“It would’ve gotten too messy for us if we’d said it’s the Night Stalker and done the sort of Tarantino riff on that,” Brad Simpson, executive producer of The Shards, tells The Hollywood Reporter. “We live in a society where, ever since I was a kid, people were obsessed with serial killers. But there are real victims at the center of those cases, and so there’s always a question of why, and what is your responsibility? There was a decision made [here] to fictionalize these so they could fit into the story, but you also don’t deal with the real victims who might still be out there or using the serial killer plot for what some might see as entertainment.”
It’s that intentionality around this key plot point that has made it possible to connect more fully with The Shards, a series seemingly as interested as I once was in confronting for both its characters and viewers the uneasy question of, “Why wasn’t it me?”
The Trawler Is a Sign of His Time and Creators
The Shards’ vision of 1981 L.A. comes from two people “both obsessed with pop culture and movies, with the secrets that people have [and] hidden histories of homosexuality. These are things that are in their worlds,” says Simpson.
“They both have a gift for exploring really dark themes with really vulnerable characters and getting into the psyche of people that seem very different on the surface,” says actress Evan Rachel Wood, who stars as Liz Schaffer, the wife of the closeted and cheating producer. “They’re both good at the glitz and glamour, with the underbelly.”
It’s something star Kaia Gerber, who portrays the sweet and socially influential Susan Reynolds, wasn’t alive to experience. But the actress says she still appreciates the parallels that emerge from an ’80s-set story that positions “the end of youth as timeless and unavoidable.”
“I think there’s a ton of excess in the ‘80s, but there’s also so much excess now,” she tells THR. “In a big way, culturally, we’re still dealing with a lot of things that began in the 1980s for better or worse — the repercussions of that age of indulgence. It’s interesting to take everything that we’re grappling with right now and go back to the epicenter, examine how it started and how we got here.”
It’s fitting then that the Trawler is targeting Bret’s young, affluent classmates at their elite prep school. Within them are the seeds of an entire decade, its inherent promises and inevitable losses, making them the perfect mechanism for exploring the horrors of “peak Gen X,” according to Simpson.
“It’s these parentless kids leaving their houses untethered by technology and sort of raising themselves. Your parents don’t know where you are all night. This is way before helicopter parents,” he explains. “You also had a real world at the time that we say was the golden age of serial killers, where they had names, they were stalked, they were famous. They were celebrities in a very weird way. And in Los Angeles, there was this real threat.”
The Violence Embodies the Dark Side of Growing Up
“Bret’s first book, Less Than Zero, is set very much in the world of parentless teens who are very wealthy in Los Angeles and trying to find themselves,” the producer tells THR. “His most notorious book, and probably most famous book, is also American Psycho, about a serial killer. People made the connection that this is a mashup of those two things, but I think that’s too simple in a lot of ways.”
For Graham Campbell, who portrays Susan’s (ex-)boyfriend Thom Wright, The Shards is a distinct entry within the genre of YA, a space that generally peddles mild discomfort rather than distress. “What’s most compelling about the way we tell this story is that it kind of takes what feels like life and death to a group of high schoolers and puts it against the backdrop of actual life and death,” he explains.
“There is a theme in this about a moment lost among all these young, beautiful people to something waiting for them on the outside. Some people could say that’s adulthood,” Simpson says. “I can’t speak on Bret’s behalf, but on his podcast and in his work, he’s obsessed with the significance of these moments when you are a child on the verge of adulthood, and the secrets that you hold in that time.”
“It’s this moment in high school where you feel like you definitely know who you are and you have no idea who you are. You’re trying on identities. You have secrets. If you were gay, you are not in a position to really be honest with anybody about who you are. You feel incredibly close to your friends, but you start to realize you don’t know what is going on in their minds and hearts,” the EP continues. “The Trawler is just a bigger, more intense idea of what it’s like to be a teenager.”
According to Jordan Roth, who plays Terry Schaffer’s unappreciated and resentful assistant Steven, the Trawler’s murderous metaphor around becoming extends to the series’ adults. “[The teens] are coming into themselves, exploring and experiencing that loss of innocence. Then we’re watching a small trio of adults who have lost it, who are on the other side of that experience still coping and thrashing about.”
“The adults in the show are desperately trying to cling to their youth, wishing that they could go back and do things differently,” adds Wood. “It’s that clashing of regret and hope, and there’s this underlying dysfunction that runs through all of it. Everybody’s trying to fill a void somehow that’s just not getting filled. It’s a bottomless pit.”
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The Trawler Is a Manifestation of Bret’s Repression
The Trawler is never identified in Ellis’ book, but several crumbs suggest certain possibilities, including Bret himself.
“Bret is an unreliable narrator. He’s a storyteller, and you can’t trust him. That’s, of course, more difficult to get across in a show, but there are moments where we do try to show whether what just happened really happened, or is it in Bret’s imagination,” Simpson says. “There’s a real experience of being in high school and having your own narrative, but we want people to question Bret’s point of view, question what they’re seeing and the way they see it. Whether Robert Mallory is real or not — he seems very real in some episodes and a figment of imagination in others.”
“I think for Bret, Robert’s this version of a person who, in some way, he wants to be. It’s his fear, but also his desire. This thing that’s maybe unattainable, this guy who’s just out of reach. He’s referencing Khalil Gibran as a 17-year-old. It doesn’t make sense. He has to be not a real guy,” says Gere, on playing Bret’s foil in the FX series adaptation. “It was fun playing a character who’s a little bit ‘too cool to exist,’ and it’s playing off that with Igby as two sides of a coin.”
“Bret is going through a period of discovery about himself, but in this semi-isolation that is indicative of the times,” adds Igby Rigney, who portrays the fictionalized Ellis. “He is in his stepping into the becoming stage, and maybe being forced into the light rather than being embraced into the light. I think that’s a very scary experience that I’m sure a lot of high schoolers have.”
Like everyone, serial killers are shaped in their adolescence. Bret’s blurring of fact and fiction leaves readers, and now viewers, asking if Bret’s behavior is merely a killer trying to cover their tracks, or if his mind has possibly splintered, the unreliable narrator unable to trust even himself. Or perhaps, in a wilder theory, are characters like Robert even real? Is all the drama and death merely a dream, shards of Bret’s own psyche standing in for the youthful impulses he must embrace or kill to grow up?
The creative team offers “a slower unwrapping” of what’s actually happening “than in the book because of the demands of the medium,” says Jacobson. “One of the chief joys of the book is Bret’s unreliability, and as a reader, your shifting relationship with him and the story as a result of that. One of the most challenging dimensions of an adaptation — especially a show that wants to be [a show] since Bret and Ryan from the beginning wanted it to be ongoing — is that it requires slowing elements of the book down to make space for it to play out.”
Murphy Adds New Layers to Ellis’ Trawler
Alongside the story’s obfuscation around Bret, the FX series mixes in a few twists that expand how audiences might interpret the Trawler. “Because the book is really based in Bret’s perspective the whole time, you never really get to see anyone else’s stories,” says Hayes Warner, who portrays Debbie, Bret’s girlfriend, and Liz and Terry’s daughter. “This adaptation does an incredible job diving into each character’s backstory. You can see why they are the way that they are.”
“We’re showing scenes that are outside of Bret’s point of view, and we shift in every episode and every moment, not just some of the perspectives, but what you think characters might be hiding,” explains Simpson. “Ryan would often tell actors on set to play this scene like you’re secretly the Trawler, even if it was clear that they weren’t. We want this show to be about that lived experience of being a teenager and not being able to trust the people around you and their emotions, or trust your own emotions.”
Gerber notes that Murphy “didn’t tell any of us who the Trawler is, and we still don’t know. He says he knows, and he’s the only one.” For the actors that meant, “You’re keeping two versions of your character alive at the same time,” adds Gere. “What’s the version of this that’s the acceptable, moral thing, and then what’s the worst version of it? We really had fun playing with who our characters are.”
Those shifts not only illuminate more of each character’s motivations and mechanisms, but heighten the suspicions of Bret and viewers. “It’s all an opportunity to play with characters who you would not have the time necessarily to give that much dimensionality or suspicion to in a shorter format,” Jacobson tells THR.
“The book has Bret identifying the killer, but there’s no omniscient novelist doing it. So you’re left arguing about who the serial killer is. Is it one of the kids? Is it Bret himself?” Simpson says. “Especially in the first season, we wanted people to still be debating over who they thought it was, or if it was even one of these kids. Because there’s a total reading that the killer is still an external force, this metaphysical figure stalking them. It could be adulthood. It could be their queerness. It could be AIDS.”
Murphy brought the latter interpretation into the show’s mix. “Ryan has spoken about the notion that we are in the early ‘80s, 1981, when AIDS first became public,” says Roth. “This killer is striking down young people in the prime of their lives. So it is a real serial killer in our story, but also a metaphor for what the world was about to experience.”
Adds Jacobson: “You never know who will get taken. Especially in that time. When, who, how — it’s just looming fear.”
“It was one of the first things we talked about,” explains Simpson. “One of the writers, Juli Weiner, in her initial email to Ryan, talked about why she wanted to be on the show and about AIDS as a metaphor in this. It was something we tried not to layer on thick, but it’s in there. And Ryan has said whether or not that is Bret’s stated intention, it is the intention of the show.”
‘The Shards’ Killer Is a Microcosm of and Lesson in Our Fear
That “looming fear” is also playing out off screen, where despite victims and their families frequently requesting respect and privacy, killers’ crimes are regularly sensationalized. It’s fueled by a fear of these killers — and fascination with what is behind their making — that permeates beyond their immediate victims.
“Part of the reason we are so fascinated by serial killers is that they’re a different breed of human, and we can’t really wrap our brains around that type of evil. We can’t put ourselves in the shoes of a person like that,” says Wood. “So there’s a wanting to understand how somebody could get to that point. What is that like? What is that mentality? It’s fear, but there’s also a need to understand and it’s a slippery slope because sometimes we can focus too much on the villain.”
As a consumer of true crime, Gerber shares that learning about the killers and their victims is a “way of facing your fears about the dangers of the world. If I learn as much as I can about them and the psychology of them, maybe in some way I can protect myself.” For Campbell, the public’s larger fascination can also be “less about the actual serial killing and more about an individual who’s choosing to act based on their own will and wants instead of within the confines of society. That’s an attractive thing to anybody — somebody willing to go after what they want regardless of the consequences.”
All point to why, in real life or on the screen, these specific criminals have managed to capture so much of our attention. Through The Shards, the Trawler specifically addresses the darker parts of becoming, whether victim or killer, by exploring that “pivotal time in every young person’s life where it’s all about the pack mentality, being part of the status quo and fitting in, not really differentiating yourself too much,” says Gerber.
“Then suddenly you’re discovering your identity, your sexuality, who you are as an individual. That, at least in The Shards, to me felt like the horrors that are lying beneath the surface,” the actress continues. “The why not me or why me, it’s a question about differentiating yourself, the individuality of people — how we start to become our own person versus part of this larger group.”
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The Shards season one is available to stream on Hulu.
