Ryan Murphy adapted the wrong Bret Easton Ellis novel

The Shards’ unrecognizable adaptation

Did you know that The Shards is about a serial killer tormenting the students at Buckley School and writ large, the city of Los Angeles? You might be hard-pressed to remember this while watching “Murder on the Dancefloor,” the fifth episode of Ryan Murphy’s “adaptation” of Bret Easton Ellis’ novel. Adaptation is used extremely loosely here. Actually, no, the pretense of adaptation has been completely abandoned by the series’ midway point because this show no longer has anything to do with the aforementioned book and everything to do with Murphy’s desire to direct a show with dance sequences and people snorting lines of cocaine and being vaguely threatening to one another, not in a red herring-for-murder kind of way, but in an I-want-to-steal-your-girlfriend kind of way, or an I-want-to-fuck-this-high-schooler kind of way.

The reviews of Murphy’s series have gone from morbid curiosity to utter disdain as the weeks progress, which is a stark contrast to Ellis’ novel, which most reviews panned for its length, but still, “as the story proceeds, it also becomes easier to admire Ellis' ability to sustain the mood,” as Kirkus Reviews wrote. Reader sentiment is even higher! It has a 4 on Goodreads. The reviews of the series are more in line with this review of a different Ellis book from 1994. Liza Schwarzbaum, reviewing Ellis’ only collection of short stories, The Informers, for Entertainment Weekly, wrote: “I finally figured out the best way to finish The Informers, the fourth novel by the willfully enervating Bret Easton Ellis: Do 10 pages, take a nap. Do another 10, watch a Mary Tyler Moore rerun. Finish a chapter, celebrate with a Snickers bar. Don’t, for God’s sake, touch any alcohol, not if you want to make it to the end of this soul-dead collection of poorly drawn sketches stitched together as a novel. Do remember that Ellis’ work does not represent the state of hip fiction today.”

Generally, I’m more fond of The Informers than critics in ‘94 were. But I’ll admit, not every story works! And most of them seem like they were written in one coked-out night. But that’s exactly how Murphy’s version of The Shards feels. We’ve abandoned the Trawler storyline for an entire episode about a dance competition show. Inexplicably, the main cast members all attend. Even more inexplicably, adults Terry, Steven, and Liz are either on set or watching at home. It’s Glee logic, where everyone in the cast gives a fuck about McKinley High’s glee club, when realistically, if there’s a club you’re not part of in school, it would never be on your radar.

The novel’s central mystery has been abandoned for us to watch: Bret teach Thom how to dance (doing some really gay wiggling for someone closeted), Thom freak out about not being able to dance while Robert moves in on Susan, Debbie compete against Cha Cha on Dance Off!, Terry attempt to manipulate the votes for Debbie to win, Steven attempt to blackmail Ryan for starring in porn, and Cha Cha plead with Anthony Ramos, guest-starring as the host of Dance Off!, to leave his wife for her. None of this is in the fucking book, but even beyond that, why the fuck would we care about any of this when we’ve been watching a murder mystery up till now?

Famously, Ellis didn’t plan on releasing The Informers. But he was late on finishing Glamorama and had a bunch of leftover material from when he’d written Less Than Zero in high school. According to The New York Times, “[Ellis’] latest novel began instead as a series of sketches — whose only function was to distract him from the book he was supposed to be writing. Begun in 1983, the sketches grew to fill "four or five big notebooks" over the ensuing decade, Mr. Ellis, 30, recalled in a telephone interview from his summer residence in Amagansett, L.I. Last year, when he seemed irretrievably stuck on the book he was under contract for — a novel about supermodels and celebrity¹ — he offered the notebooks to his publisher instead. Pared down from 32 chapters, the finished book comprises 13 interconnected tales of dissolute, moneyed Angelenos and their disaffected children.”

Interconnected tales of dissolute, moneyed Angelenos is essentially what Murphy’s television series is. It’s as if adapting The Shards was just a pretense to make a show set in the ‘80s about whatever the fuck he wanted. There was a bad film adaptation of The Informers in 2008 that I’m sure no one remembers. Maybe Murphy should’ve just adapted that. The Informers even has vampires. He would’ve loved that shit! But then again, this is Murphy we’re talking about. Who’s to say vampires won’t just randomly pop up in this TV show just because Murphy thinks they’re cool?

1. Glamorama was eventually published four years later.