Ryan Murphy’s rise as a preeminent TV producer (and writer, and director) happened to coincide, roughly, with the beginning of my career as a critic. Sure, he had Popular back when I was in high school, and Nip/Tuck came along during my college years. But everything after, from the Glee boom to the unending American Horror Story age, happened during my tenures at various publications, years in which I have, again and again, been made, or have chosen, to interact with the prolific creator’s output. 

And thus how many times have I warily approached something that, on paper, seems like a bit of me (to use Love Island UK parlance). It’s dozens, at this point, whether it’s been a cautious excitement for a haunted-house show or a lark involving New Orleans witches, an eagerness to get a peek into the glass closet of Old Hollywood, a curiosity about a sociological deep dive into a serial killer’s place in history. Time and time again, Murphy has dashed those tentative hopes, turning a good idea (or a worthy piece of IP) into something scattershot, crass, and shallow. 

Of course, Murphy has produced some worthy television—The People vs. O.J. Simpson is pretty much a masterpiece, while The Assassination of Gianni Versace and Capote vs. the Swans are quite good—but so much of his output is ugly and borderline malevolent. 

He is particularly punishing when it comes to stories of gay men. I suppose there is some grudging admiration to be given for how successfully Murphy has insisted that gay narratives exist in something like the mainstream, that he has gotten so much money from the likes of Netflix and Fox (and later Disney) to tell dark, risqué stories of men groping and thrashing at each other. But he has done it so frequently, and others so infrequently, that he has in some ways become the main game in town; his miserablist take on gay male experience has become TV’s totalizing view on the matter. (Which is partly why the arrival of Heated Rivalry felt like such a breath of fresh air.) 

Yet I keep coming back, either out of professional obligation or a haggard optimism that maybe this time we’ll get a Versace (bleak but sensitive) instead of a Hollywood (annihilating and stupid). Which is how I approached The Shards (FX, August 5), Murphy’s new series which he co-created with the source material’s author, Bret Easton Ellis. Having watched the entire first season, I am afforded a certain hindsight: I now see that it was crazy of me to ever think that a collaboration between Murphy and Ellis—the latter another frequently self-loathing gay man who tends toward nihilism—would be something I enjoyed. 

But before I’d seen the season, I dared to let myself dream. Friends of good taste really liked the book (from 2023). They felt, as did formal reviews, that Ellis was at long last showing a deeper, more soulful side of himself, previously so occluded by his obsessions with meanness and money and haughty indifference. I liked that idea, that an author I enjoyed in my youth but then turned against (largely because of his awful social media presence, tbh) would win me back with something at least a little sincere, a memoir-cum-muder-mystery that would locate the adolescent pain that perhaps animated all his subsequent work. That sounded like something that Murphy could get a lot out of too, a chance to exorcise some demons while also telling a sexy, suspenseful story. 

So I readily pressed play on The Shards, knowing that there would likely be some bumps in the road and probably some shaky performances from actors cast primarily for their looks, but choosing to believe that something worthwhile could endure in the end.