Los Angeles, CA – Some stories refuse to stay on the page. FX’s The Shards, adapted from Bret Easton Ellis’ 2023 novel, rethinks the television serial killer by never identifying its murderer. Set in 1981 Los Angeles, the series follows 17-year-old Bret Easton Ellis (Igby Rigney), a promising writer in his senior year at a private prep school, whose paranoid suspicions focus on Robert Mallory (Homer Gere), a charming newcomer. Robert’s arrival coincides with that of the Trawler, a serial killer murdering young people around L.A., but the killer is never named, making the monster feel as metaphorical as 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, told 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?” The creative team made a deliberate decision to fictionalize the killer so the story could explore the fears of adolescence without exploiting real victims.
The Trawler targets Bret’s young, affluent classmates at their elite prep school, making them a 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,” he explained. “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.” For the actors, the mystery extended off-screen—Ryan Murphy didn’t tell any of them who the Trawler is. Kaia Gerber noted, “He says he knows, and he’s the only one.” The series also incorporates the emergence of AIDS as a metaphor, with Murphy describing the killer as representing “what the world was about to experience.” Season one of The Shards is available to stream on Hulu.
