We won’t call this series a guilty pleasure because, truly, no one feels guilty anymore for prioritizing the pleasurable over the intellectual. There’s no longer even a need to shelter behind irony to consume products like The Shards, crafted for the enjoyment of the most primitive sensory terminals. It responds to a mental state as exhaustively general as it is wide-ranging in which Ryan Murphy, showrunner of this series, navigates with perfect ease. Who wouldn’t enjoy a fiction based on youth, beauty, sex and a moral code beyond the reach of most people.
From Murphy’s factory have come marvels such as Feud (2017) or Pose (2018); addictive series such as some seasons of American Horror Story (2011) or Love Story (2026) and also titles that, despite their aesthetic wrapper, bore more than anything, in the case of The Beauty (2026). In The Shards, he relies on elements that do promise entertainment in hot-key, perfect for the confinement under the air conditioning imposed by this summer’s heat waves. The first, which adapts the homonymous novel by Bret Easton Ellis, a cult author since the 80s.
Set in Los Angeles in the eighties, The Shards follows a group of seniors at Buckley School, an exclusive private academy. They are the pampered and prematurely libertine offspring of Hollywood’s bigwigs: the outward face that reveals nothing but is decidedly more out-of-date than the naive protagonists of Gossip Girl. The series doesn’t lack any excess and it’s even implied that one leads to another: sex, drugs, violence and luxury go hand in hand.
A Final Terrifying Year
In Spain, The Shards was literally translated: The Breakages. The narrator is Bret’s character, a stand‑in for Bret Easton Ellis himself, an aspiring writer who recounts to his editor his last year in high school. A chilling year, for the arrival at the school of a mysterious new student, Robert Mallory, coincides with the appearance of a serial killer in Los Angeles, obsessed with young women.
Kaia Gerber and Homer Gere, stars of The Shards.
In fact, the cast of The Shards is the second element Murphy wants to leverage in favor of the project: the casting is pitched as a kind of generational renewal of the global mainstream acting pool. Two nepo babies stand out in this lineup of new faces: Homer Gere, son of Richard Gere, and Kaia Gerber, daughter of Cindy Crawford. Note that Gere and Crawford were married from 1991 to 1995.
The protagonist, Bret, is played by Igby Rigney, seen in other interesting series such as Midnight Mass or The Fall of the House of Usher. The inevitable blonde in every good slasher is Hayes Warner, a Gen Z pop-punk singer and a newcomers actress, just as Graham Campbell, another one of the boys who are exceedingly handsome, rich and bored. Only two veteran actors will ring to mature audiences: Wes Bentley and Evan Rachel Wood represent the decadent and dark adult world that awaits the young out-of-sync.
The Return of a Successful Genre
Murphy’s cocktail blends glamour, drugs, sex, and blood, but it remains to be seen whether the chosen actors possess enough charisma to pull off the formula, which, on paper, seems convincingly up for risk rather than the predictable. And although the presence of a serial killer who prey on young women takes us straight to the slasher genre, The Shards can also be classified within a genre that swept the 80s and 90s: the erotic thriller. In fact, Murphy’s new series is going to evoke memories of dark and sexy films with teen ensembles that dominated the late 90s.
The cast of The Shards, in full.
The sexy thriller exploded onto the scene in the 80s with Dressed to Kill (Brian De Palma, 1980), Body Heat (Lawrence Kasdan, 1981) and Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, 1987) and it was cemented with Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992), Single White Female (Barbet Schroeder, 1992). By the late 90s, the genre had slipped with titles featuring high-school students, such as The Shards: Wild Things (John McNaughton, 1998) and Cruel Intentions (Roger Kumble, 1999).
Cruel Intentions, titled Sexual Games in Latin America, is a teen version of the classic Dangerous Liaisons, starring the actors slated to dominate Hollywood in the first decade of the 21st century: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Reese Witherspoon, Ryan Phillippe and Selma Blair. Wild Things, Savage Creatures on the other side of the Atlantic, brought together Denise Williams, Neve Campbell, Matt Dillon and Kevin Bacon in a film that sparked controversy for its eroticism. Both are available on streaming platforms.
