Hit point: The Spectator says The Shards is easily the best drama on TV, and it does so by treating Bret Easton Ellis’s Los Angeles as a place where style and menace run on the same track. The review’s central claim is not just that the series looks good, but that its early-1980s setting and serial-killer plot line work as a single, controlled machine.
Bret Easton Ellis and Los Angeles
The review says The Shards is based on Bret Easton Ellis’s semi-autobiographical slasher novel The Shards, and that it plays as a younger, hipper version of Riders. That framing matters because the show is being judged against a wider Bret Easton Ellis world, not as a standalone genre exercise. The setting is described as endless sex with beautiful people, hot tubs, fast cars, cocktails, sharp tailoring, languidly drawled one-liners, tennis, and horses — a nostalgic version of the 1980s rather than a strict replay of it.
Bret appears in the story as a character named Bret, with Igby Rigney in the role. Kaia Gerber plays Susan Reynolds, while Homer Gere plays Robert Mallory. That cast list tells you where the adaptation is placing its emphasis: not on a procedural mystery, but on social drift, attraction, and the pressure that builds when a new arrival is both “mysterious” and “sinister.”
Robert Mallory in The Shards
Robert Mallory arrives as the review’s sharpest fixed point. He is described as handsome, mysterious, and sinister, which is exactly the kind of figure that can turn an ensemble drama into a stalking narrative without forcing the show to announce its genre too loudly. In adaptation terms, that means the series is not merely borrowing the novel’s atmosphere; it is using character design to keep the threat inside the social circle.
The review’s description of the Trawler makes the violence stranger than a standard slasher setup. He sneaks into houses, steals fish from tropical tanks, disembowels them, and later serves them up with the victim’s body; he kills pets as well, then wraps corpses in fishing nets and displays them somewhere ostentatious like a tennis court. The nickname comes from those acts, which tie the killer’s methods to a repeated visual pattern instead of a single crime scene.
Igby Rigney as Bret
Igby Rigney’s Bret carries the story with a dry, knowing, wistful voice-over, and that choice does more than narrate the plot. It gives the adaptation a retrospective filter, so the violence sits inside memory rather than pure shock. For viewers, that is the difference between spectacle and point of view: the series is not asking them to watch events from a distance, but to hear them through a narrator who already knows where the night is headed.
The review also says the writer usually dislikes graphic violence in cable TV drama and could not finish American Psycho, yet still finds The Shards bearable because of its context. That contradiction is the useful one here. The show’s violence may be graphic, but the review’s tolerance comes from the way the adaptation stages it inside a specific 1980s social world, with the glamour, tension, and rot presented as one package rather than separate effects.
What remains most interesting is the boundary between implication and display. The review leaves open how much of the novel’s violence the TV adaptation actually shows, and that is the practical question for viewers deciding whether to start it: the atmosphere is already doing much of the work, while the adaptation’s full visual threshold is still part of the viewing experience itself.
