‘The Shards’ on FX Review: Ryan Murphy’s Glossy Bret Easton Ellis Show is a Hoot of a Horror Comedy

So much of author and iconoclast Bret Easton Ellis‘s brand is devoted to aesthetic beauty and how it can mask a festering, often violent, rot beneath. FX‘s The Shards — premiering tonight at 9 PM ET on FX and Hulu — is the latest manifestation of this: a glossy, glamorous Ryan Murphy joint following a group of the most deliriously beautiful teens as they emotionally torture one another and (maybe) actually physically torture and murder their way around 1981 Los Angeles. The Shards is based on Ellis’s novel of the same name, a fictionalized memoir that imagines the author recounting his senior year attending Los Angeles’s iconic prep school Buckley Academy with a savage twist. What if young Bret (Igby Rigney) wasn’t just a wealthy teenaged wannabe writer trying to stifle his homosexuality i