Ryan Murphy's 'The Shards' Is Explicitly Gay, and Critics Are Divided on It

Ryan Murphy and Bret Easton Ellis have finally made something together, which is a pairing that has been sitting there waiting to happen for years. The Shards premiered Wednesday night on FX and Hulu with its first two episodes.

It is adapted from Ellis's 2023 novel — all 600-plus pages of it — and the two of them co-created the series. Murphy directed the pilot and co-wrote it with Ellis, as TV Guide reported. The setting is 1981, at a Los Angeles prep school, among teenagers rich enough that nothing has ever had a consequence. A serial killer called the Trawler is working his way through the city's young people. A new student, Robert Mallory (Homer Gere), arrives and everyone falls for him except Bret.

There are nine episodes, and the rollout is lumpy rather than strictly weekly: two arrived on premiere night, another pair follows a week later, then a single, then a further pair on August 26, running through to a September 9 finale, according to IndieWire. Every drop is a Wednesday.

What is actually in it

This is the part worth being specific about, because "a Ryan Murphy show" covers a lot of ground.

The narrator is Bret — Ellis himself, rewritten at seventeen — played by Igby Rigney, who you may know from Mike Flanagan's Netflix thrillers. Bret is closeted, and the show does not treat that as subtext. TV Guide describes him plainly as gay and deeply in the closet. Variety's review describes his hookups with a school stoner named Matt (Owen Painter) slotted between dates with his girlfriend Debbie (Hayes Warner). TheWrap put it more bluntly still: he is dating Debbie even though he would rather be sleeping with men.

There is a second closet in the show, a generation up, and the reviews do not treat it gently. Debbie's father Terry, played by Wes Bentley, is, in The Hollywood Reporter's description, “a barely closeted producer preying on young men”; IndieWire has him hiding his affairs with men to protect his standing in the industry. Variety's reviewer noticed the way Terry looks Bret over while offering to read his screenplay.

So there is real gay content here, and it is central rather than decorative. The Hollywood Reporter lists boundary-pushing sexuality among the things a Murphy–Ellis production was always going to deliver, alongside the opulence and the soundtrack.

The reception, honestly

As of Saturday, The Shards sits at 55% on Rotten Tomatoes across 42 critic reviews — up from the 52% GoldDerby clocked on launch day. The audience score is lower at 34%, though that rests on 50-odd ratings, a small enough sample that it may move a long way yet.

A 55% across 42 reviews means roughly half the critics liked it, so the disagreement is real. We should be straight with you about which half we read.

The five we read are all somewhere between mixed and hostile. Variety ran its review under a headline saying the show cannot be saved by a strong lead performance, and pinpoints the turn — the first two episodes track the book closely, then the series starts making bolder choices and, in the reviewer's words, goes off the rails. IndieWire graded it a C and said it never comes together, calling it a production full of potential with no idea what to do with it. TheWrap's reviewer went in wondering whether the novel was adaptable at all and came out saying it isn't. The Hollywood Reporter's verdict line is “Nostalgic, over-the-top and unsurprisingly uneven,” and it carries the one consumer warning worth repeating: THR says the nine episodes reach no conclusion by the finale. TV Guide scored it 6 out of 10, liking the period detail and the cast, disliking the unfocused tone and characters who never quite read as people — its reviewer calls the show a tonal puzzle it never fully solves.

The enthusiastic half reaches us secondhand, through GoldDerby's roundup rather than the reviews themselves. There, Kaiya Shunyata of RogerEbert.com is quoted calling it “one of the best adaptations of the year,” Nick Schager of The Daily Beast likens it to “Beverly Hills, 90210 meets The Silence of the Lambs,” Chris Barsanti of Slant calls it “stylish” and says it produces “something vivid and memorable, despite the too-muchness,” and Aaron Pruner of CNET praises it as “a throwback to an era of hypnotic horror thrillers, before slashers fully took hold of the genre.”

One caution about that roundup, since we are leaning on it: GoldDerby files Variety's review under its positive column, on the strength of the phrase “strong lead performance” — which appears in a Variety headline saying the show cannot be saved by one. It also says the season has eight episodes ending September 2, where every other source we checked says nine, ending September 9. Treat its sorting as a rough guide.

On Rigney the critics are split too, and not along the obvious line. Variety calls him terrific and credits him with making the character's contradictions legible from the outside; IndieWire, which was hard on almost everything else, called his lead turn solid. TheWrap was cooler, calling it “a mostly decent impersonation of Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman.” THR was less taken, finding something almost alien about him and his young co-stars, and TV Guide thought his affected pretentiousness made it hard to care what happened to him.

Should you bother

Our read, and it is only ours: the complaints in the reviews we read do not point one way. IndieWire and TheWrap both fault the show for losing hold of the novel's ambition; TV Guide and THR are mostly bothered by tone. Nobody we read faults it for the gay material, which is at least a change.

The most useful steer we found came from THR. It reckons that after the early episodes the show almost becomes an unacknowledged third season of Murphy's Scream Queens — something that, in its words, “may irritate Ellis devotees but results in a show that's funnier and odder and more willing to take wild swings.” If that reads as a warning to you, skip it. If it reads as a plan for a Wednesday night, you will be fine.

New episodes air Wednesdays on FX and stream on Hulu.