The Shards Review: Murphy's Comeback on Disney+
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- The Shards, Murphy's Disney+ adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's 1980s-set metafictional novel, follows protagonist Bret (Igby Rigney) and his gilded LA high school circle while a serial killer dubbed "the Trawler" stalks victims — first young women, then young men, with mutilated bodies and pentagrams escalating citywide panic.
- The reviewer frames the series as Murphy's "comeback" after his nadir with last year's legal drama All's Fair, which drew rare zero-star reviews yet was renewed for a second season; the recovery arc also passes through The Beauty and the JFK Jr./Carolyn Bessette series Love Story.
- The cast is deliberately stocked with children of 80s icons: Kaia Gerber plays class president Susan and is described as "the absolute image" of supermodel mother Cindy Crawford, while Homer Gere — son of Richard Gere and Carey Lowell — plays Robert, the troubled new boy whom Bret's voiceover likens to "a virus" invading and destroying his circle.
- The Trawler subplot functions as a metaphor for the coming AIDS epidemic; Bret keeps a knife by his typewriter, and a former secret accuses him of stalking and home tampering before being tortured to death on a phone call.
- Troye Sivan composed original music for the soundtrack alongside contemporary 80s hits, which the reviewer credits with evoking "heartfelt melancholy" for an era nearly two decades before the singer was born.
- The reviewer's core argument is that The Shards distinguishes itself through genuine nostalgia — "a yearning" rather than mere period recreation — for a pre-internet, pre-climate-crisis youth when drugs and sex were discoveries rather than escapes.
Why it matters: Murphy's commercial and critical standing is materially at stake: All's Fair drew zero-star notices yet was renewed, so a widely praised Ellis adaptation on Disney+ would vindicate his pivot back to prestige-leaning material after a string of uneven projects. The Shards also marks one of the higher-profile screen adaptations of Ellis's autobiographical work, which the reviewer had previously avoided because "an enfant terrible's reminiscences are too often simply terrible."
