You can almost hear the show creator dropping the logline on the studio executive: “It’s Beverly Hills 90210 meets Dexter, but set in the 1980s, so Gen X won’t be able to resist.”
“Tell me more,” says the drooling Vice President of Scripted Series.
The idea man continues, “Based on Less Than Zero’s even hornier origin story, it features tons of sex, cocaine, and Cindy Crawford’s daughter swimming in her lingerie. Bret Easton Ellis wrote the source material, and Ryan Murphy adapted it for TV.”
The brief pitch leaves the network rep with only one question: “Where do I send the check?”
The show is The Shards on FX, or maybe it’s from Hulu - I can’t really tell. Anyway, it’s about a serial killer who stalks the wealthy, gorgeous, immensely orgasmed teenagers of 1981 Los Angeles. It is crass, overly earnest nostalgia wrapped in the transparent absurdity of a serial-killer thriller.
I cannot stop watching it.
(Spoiler alert: the following paragraphs divulge important plot points.)
The spectacularly attractive cast features Evan Rachel Wood as a clichéd drunk, washed-up actress, competing for attention with her teenage daughter, Debbie. Played by Hayes Warner, Debbie is the quintessential 80s beauty - a feather-banged Barbie with a perfect body and well-earned daddy issues.
Her father, a juicy-permed film producer, slithers around Hollywood in Armani and his convertible Jaguar, seducing Debbie’s budding novelist boyfriend Bret with promises to acquire the young man’s screenplay (what would become Less Than Zero).
Meanwhile Debbie—follow me here—ends up in the sack with another bisexual classmate, Ryan. This guy not only has a huge schlong, but is Bret’s former lover, and recently banged Debbie’s mom on the set of a VHS porn production.
In this way and many more, The Shards scrapes the bottom of the television barrel, dispensing utterly deplorable, dehumanizing filth. It is putrid, vapid smut of the lowest order.
And I cannot wait to see the next episode.
Watching The Shards is a funny experience. I know Ellis and Murphy are manipulating me with their beautifully curated period piece. The pitch-perfect soundtrack, vintage Porsches and Mercedes, and designer wardrobes weave a tableau of the idealized ‘80s lifestyle. This is exactly the way you would have lived if you had loads of money, impeccable taste, and chronically absent parents.
You too could attend a prep school where kids smoke cigarettes, share Klonopin like Tic Tacs, and treat each other like human charcuterie boards.
The serial murders put a damper on the otherwise cheery zeitgeist, but we must endure them because, in the modern app-TV world, sex and drugs get you only so far.
These gruesome killings provide scenes where carnage and pop culture coincide in “on-the-nose,” but still glorious ways: a corpse in the parking lot of the Tower Records; hostage messages recorded on Maxell cassette tapes; a backpack with an Elvis Costello backstage pass soaked in blood. It’s that irresistible part of a Venn Diagram where kitsch and gore intersect.
Unable to turn it off, I consciously ask myself, “Why am I watching this nonsense?”
I feel the same way about another show in the “Rich White People Behaving Badly” genre, the Apple TV series Your Friends and Neighbors.
Its likewise beautiful, if older, cast features Jon Hamm, Amanda Peet, and Olivia Munn. They play out the preposterous plot line of Hamm’s newly divorced, middle-aged banker character who gets fired, then starts stealing watches, first-edition books, and rare baseball cards from his friends who, apparently, don’t know how to install Ring security cameras.
These shows aren’t different stories so much as they’re before-and-after pictures of the same appetites. But while The Shards teens come across as sophisticated beyond their years, the characters in Your Friends and Neighbors (YFAN) appear self-indulgent and childish.
The financial adviser who drives a Rolls-Royce (hint: if your wealth manager drives a $450k-car, get a new wealth manager), the man-child retired NBA star, and the psychotic billionaire, because anyone who has earned that much money must be a little bit evil, right?
Also, somebody gets murdered. Or maybe they don’t. But there’s a great deal of blood.
Both shows are reprehensible while being totally unmissable. But I hold the YFAN characters in greater contempt because watching people my age bumble around life is considerably more depressing. The teens in The Shards are shallow, but still radiate possibility. They’re using sex, beauty, drugs, and status to discover who they might become.
The adults in Your Friends and Neighbors have had their chances and screwed them up. Their promiscuity isn’t exploration - it’s a lifeline. Their drinking and using aren’t experimentation – they’re maintenance.
Maybe this is what our parents’ generation experienced from prime-time soap operas like Dallas and Dynasty, i.e. the joy of watching flawed people make enormous mistakes in enormous houses. We get to envy them and judge them simultaneously—to covet their beautiful lives while reassuring ourselves that none of it would have made us happy anyway.
The Shards makes emptiness look exciting. Your Friends and Neighbors makes it look regrettable.
“My God, that was dumb,” I think after every episode.
Then immediately: “Same time next week?”
My wife has affectionately renamed "The Shards" "The Shart." And yet, we can't stop watching.
We too couldn’t stop watching YFAN. Thanks for helping me find my next show in The Shards!