A new trailer from Ryan Murphy's latest FX series pitches pink cocaine, male hookers, and teen serial killings as a coming-of-age story — and the same corporate apparatus bankrolling it wants you to trust their moral authority.
"The Shards," premiering August 5 on FX and Hulu, adapts Bret Easton Ellis' 2023 novel set at an elite Los Angeles prep school in 1981. The trailer opens with a young aspiring writer named Bret pitching his story to an editor played by Wes Bentley. "Does it have sex in it?" Bentley's character asks. "Yes." "Pink cocaine.. male hookers?" "That too." "Everyone loves a good coming-of-age story," the editor replies. Coming-of-age. That's what they're calling it.
The series follows a 17-year-old version of Ellis during his final year at the elite Buckley prep school, according to Deadline. A mysterious new student named Robert Mallory — played by Homer Gere, son of Richard Gere — arrives just as a serial killer called The Trawler starts targeting teenagers. The rest is a parade of Eighties excess: sex, glamour, bloody backpacks, frightening kidnappings, and what Yahoo described as "overwrought high school drama" with a "gruesome tinge."
The cast is a who's-who of Hollywood lineage. Kaia Gerber — daughter of Cindy Crawford — plays Susan. The adult roles feature Evan Rachel Wood and Jordan Roth. This is an industry that casts its own and calls it merit.
KABC-TV noted that The Walt Disney Company is the parent company of FX, Hulu, and their own ABC station — a detail the other outlets conveniently buried. Disney, the same corporation that lectures families about inclusion and equity, is distributing a show whose own trailer uses teen drug use and prostitution as a marketing hook. Yahoo, for its part, framed the content as simply showcasing "what a good match Ellis and Murphy are for each other" — as if graphic adolescent debauchery is just an aesthetic choice.
Ellis, author of "American Psycho" and "Less Than Zero," has built a career on transgressive violence and sexual depravity dressed up as social commentary. Murphy has built his empire on the same formula. Now both are backed by a media monopoly that would silence a working-class American for expressing the wrong opinion online while pumping this content into millions of homes.
The executive producer list runs fourteen names deep, including Nina Jacobson, Brad Simpson, and Ellis himself. The series is produced by 20th Television — another Disney subsidiary. The money flows one direction: from your subscription fees to the people who think your values are the problem.
The question isn't whether Americans can choose not to watch. The question is why the same institutions that push this poison feel entitled to police your speech, your schools, and your children — and why no one in the press thinks that's worth mentioning.
