Sex, drugs and serial killers: inside Ryan Murphy and Bret Easton Ellis’s lurid TV thriller

The Shards brings the cocaine-addled teens of a 1980s prep school to life with a cast of newcomers and a heavy dose of sleaze One of the first things Ryan Murphy’s TV adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s The Shards will make you ask is: where the hell are these kids’ parents? The answer is simple. This is Los Angeles in 1981, and these fabulously benumbed kids aren’t being helicopter-parented. They’re going to parties, drinking whiskey, listening to Ultravox’s Vienna on repeat and doing copious ...

By Emma Madden