Courtesy FX Logo text If you happen to be a fan of Bret Easton Ellis’ novel The Shards, then the first two episodes of Ryan Murphy‘s adaptation for FX will be reassuringly familiar. Like the book, the TV show is told in first-person narration by a character named Bret Ellis, who looks back to Sherman Oaks in 1981 and his senior year at Buckley. Like the book, Bret is living a double life, dating a girl in public while secretly sleeping with a boy. Like the book, there’s a fateful meeting with the mysterious Robert Mallory at a movie theater in Westwood. And, yes, like the book, the serial killer known as the Trawler is stalking teenagers across Los Angeles.
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Episodes three through six, though? Let’s just say Murphy takes Ellis’ story in his own gleefully off-the-wall direction, with a newly added porn industry subplot and even a musical interlude on an American Bandstand-like TV show.
Here’s how that happened. Those first two episodes were written by Ellis years before Murphy got involved, back when The Shards was being developed by HBO. The streamer picked up the rights before the novel had even been published — indeed, before it had been finished — while Ellis was still releasing the story as weekly audio installments on his podcast in 2020 and 2021. Sources say HBO at one point was contemplating a budget north of $100 million for the project. The network had high hopes for Ellis, too, installing him as the show’s sole writer and executive producer.
But then, perhaps predictably, it all went awry. Multiple sources tell Rambling there were creative differences between Ellis and HBO — hardly a shock given that the author has bristled at adaptations of his work for 25 years, since American Psycho. The rift proved irreconcilable enough to prompt the 62-year-old author to declare a divorce from television on a 2024 podcast. “Never again,” he said. “I’m never going to do this again.”
By late 2024, after David Zaslav arrived at Warners and began budget slashing, The Shards was put in turnaround. “HBO already had Euphoria,” one source explains of the decision. That’s when Murphy, 60, a longtime Ellis fan, swooped in, acquiring the rights in a deal that included Ellis’ first two scripts. Perhaps out of respect for the author, Murphy tinkered only slightly with Ellis’ words, saving his bigger changes for later episodes (budgeted at FX at around $8 million each). He also invited Ellis to participate creatively. But again, sources say there were artistic differences and that Ellis has had no significant role in the production despite being credited as co-developer, co-writer of the first two episodes and executive producer — not to mention being the show’s main character.
Says a friend, “Bret has learned from hard experience that life is happier when he doesn’t get involved.”
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This story appeared in the Aug. 12 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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