Mark August 5 in whatever chaotic app you use for a calendar. That is the day The Shards arrives on FX and streams internationally on Disney+, and it might be the most deliciously unhinged thing on television this summer. The setup goes like this. Los Angeles, 1981. A pack of impossibly rich seventeen-year-olds drift through their final year at an elite prep school between house parties, roller skates and convertibles on the Pacific Coast Highway. Meanwhile a serial killer known as the Trawler is picking off teenagers across the city, and a magnetic new boy has just joined their circle carrying a secret the size of the Hollywood sign. Kaia Gerber plays Susan Reynolds, queen bee of the group, in a project she helped bring to FX herself. Igby Rigney stars as Bret, with Hayes Warner, Graham Campbell, Wes Bentley and Evan Rachel Wood filling out the cast.

The Book Behind It, and Why Ryan Murphy Was Born for This

The source material is Bret Easton Ellis‘s 2023 novel, which he first released as a serialised audiobook on his podcast before it hit shelves and became a bestseller. The book is semi-autobiographical, starring a seventeen-year-old version of Ellis himself at Buckley, the real school he attended, which gives the whole thing a queasy thrill. He returns to the exact territory of Less Than Zero, his 1985 debut about beautiful Los Angeles teenagers with too much money and too little supervision. Enter Ryan Murphy, who co-created the series with Ellis. Honestly, casting him as showrunner feels like handing a pyromaniac a box of matches, in the best way. Murphy has spent his career finding the rot underneath glossy American surfaces, from Feud to American Crime Story, and Ellis writes the literary equivalent. Both men adore beautiful people behaving appallingly. Both understand that a swimming pool at midnight can look sinister with the right lighting.

The Casting Twist Everyone Is Talking About

Here comes the detail that sent group chats into meltdown. Susan’s love interest, the mysterious Robert Mallory, is played by Homer Gere, son of Richard Gere. Kaia, of course, is the daughter of Cindy Crawford. Which means the two leads of a 1980s teen thriller are the children of a couple who were married to each other in the nineties, back when Crawford and Gere ruled every magazine cover on earth. Their parents split in 1995. Thirty-one years later, their kids are sharing scenes in a show about secrets and obsession. The nepo baby discourse writes itself. So does the season one finale, probably.