Ryan Murphy’s The Shards trailer teases 1981 serial killer drama

Ryan Murphy has made Bret Easton Ellis’s most notorious coming-of-age nightmare into FX’s latest wager that sex, danger and literary sleaze can still cut through streaming noise. The first trailer for The Shards arrived July 14 and pushed a glossy 1981 Los Angeles world of prep-school privilege, drugs and obsession, with a serial killer called The Trawler stalking the orbit around Ellis’s fictionalized teenage self.

The series is set to premiere on FX and Hulu on August 5, with one launch time listed at 6 p.m. PT. Built as a 10-episode run, it centers on high school seniors at an elite prep school as they navigate identity, jealousy, desire and the violence lurking beneath their social circle. FX has framed the drama as a seductive story about the darker underside of privileged teen life, a pitch that places it squarely in Murphy’s lane and squarely in the middle of the network’s prestige-TV competition for attention.

Igby Rigney plays Bret, with Homer Gere as Robert Mallory, Kaia Gerber as Susan Reynolds, Graham Campbell as Thom Wright and Hayes Warner as Debbie. Wes Bentley appears as Terry Schaffer, Evan Rachel Wood as Liz Schaffer and Jordan Roth as Steven Reinhardt, giving the series a cast built around young faces and Murphy regulars. The trailer leans into the mix of adolescent status games and serial-killer menace that has long powered Ellis’s work, especially the cold social surfaces of 1980s Los Angeles.

The source material has already traveled a long road. The Shards first surfaced as a serialized audiobook and podcast in 2020 and 2021 before a print edition followed in early 2023. Ellis’s novel, set in 1981 Los Angeles, draws on his own final year at Buckley, turning a semi-autobiographical prep-school memory into a thriller about The Trawler and the anxieties of teenage life in The Valley.

Murphy and Ellis are both credited as creators on the FX adaptation, produced by 20th Television in association with Ryan Murphy Television. Max Winkler is among the executive producers, along with Kathleen McCaffrey, Brian Young, Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson, while the project’s path to FX replaced an earlier HBO version that had Luca Guadagnino attached but did not move forward. In a crowded streaming market, The Shards is being sold as more than another period drama: it is a test of whether old-school provocation still has enough force to matter.