In The Shards, which the two adapted from Ellis’ 2023 novel, the synergy among their experiences outweighs but doesn’t erase the irreconcilability of their perspectives. The story at its surface, an autofictional but otherwise familiar account of a serial killer stalking students at Ellis’ high school in 1981, gleams with the stylish production design, savvy genre pastiche, and elaborate set pieces for which Murphy is known. Yet it’s clear the show, premiering with two episodes on FX and Hulu on Aug. 5, has greater ambitions. In the connections it makes to cultural touchstones of its period and voiceover narration from a present-day Bret, The Shards attempts to say something profound about the transition from youth to adulthood. Blame a mismatched creative team or the visual medium’s inherent privileging of images over ideas; the shallow stuff wins out.
From left: Kaia Gerber, Igby Rigney, Hayes Warner, Homer Gere, and Graham Campbell in The Shards —FXSenior year is starting and the group’s parents have long since checked out. (Bret’s are apparently vacationing overseas.) Which suits the performatively jaded teens, who chain-smoke at restaurants with white tablecloths and traverse the city without curfew or constraint. Only Debbie’s monstrous family enters the frame. Her father, Terry (Wes Bentley), is a stock predatory movie producer with an eye for underage boys. His wife, Liz (Evan Rachel Wood), is a sneak preview of Debbie’s future, self-medicating with drugs, alcohol, and wrathful outbursts. The fourth member of the household is Terry’s lurking aide, an androgynous aesthete named Steven (theater producer Jordan Roth, playing up the character’s feline strangeness). When the situation calls for a responsible adult, these are not the people you want on hand.
Wes Bentley in The Shards —Ray Mickshaw—FXThe Shards is dense with references. To make sense of the show beyond the plot’s generic teenage politicking and serial-killer thrills, you must know that The Shining is a horror story about a writer becoming violently unhinged; that its other Jack Nicholson footnote, Chinatown, is synonymous with systemic evil too entrenched to fight; that the financial disaster that was Michael Cimino’s 1980 feature Heaven’s Gate symbolizes the end of New Hollywood’s auteur-driven ’70s renaissance, leaving the industry to chase youthful faces and shiny trends. (Bret gives a Patrick-Bateman-esque monologue about how music videos are the future of art.) The casting piles new signifiers atop the source material. Gerber is the spookily identical daughter of Cindy Crawford, the ultimate Gen X beauty. Gere shares a square jaw with his father, Richard, whose breakthrough movie, American Gigolo—another tale of sex and murder in L.A., whose writer-director, Paul Schrader, worked with Ellis on The Canyons—was released just in time to be referenced by The Shards’ characters. Richard Gere was married to Crawford in the early ’90s. Gerber and Homer Gere don’t share any parents, but the connection adds a pseudo-incestuous twinge to their characters’ mutual attraction. Dig deeper, and you’ll find that Homer Gere’s mother, the actor Carrie Lowell, was once married to Griffin Dunne, the nephew of Joan Didion, whose work both Ellis and his Shards alter ego idolize.
Kaia Gerber and Homer Gere in The Shards —FXThe Shards unravels in its final few episodes. One plays on the name of the crew’s hangout, Hamburger Hamlet, drawing Murphy-ish parallels between the characters and Shakespeare’s tragic personages that are so overwrought, they can’t be salvaged by self-awareness. The bigger disappointment is a bombshell ending, albeit a narratively ambiguous one, that fizzles rather than explodes. The psychological escalation that’s supposed to lead us there never fully happens. This show about the consequences of limited introspection suffers them as well.
Hence then, the article about ryan murphy s teen serial killer thriller the shards gets stuck in the shallow end was published today ( ) and is available on Time ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Ryan Murphy’s Teen Serial Killer Thriller The Shards Gets Stuck in the Shallow End )
Also on site :