I love a good dance scene. I mean I love a good dance scene. I adore watching interesting characters played by beautiful people move their bodies in time with good music playing within their fictional world. I find interpreting their body language, feeling what the music and the movements are meant to communicate, absolutely thrilling. Dance scenes are a rhythmic audiovisual spectacle of sex and glamour. That’s the stuff movies and TV were made for. So of course I’m gonna go gaga for an entire dance episode. 

I reviewed this week’s The Shards for Decider.

The episode ends with Debbie refusing to look up at the beautiful sky. “I’ve seen it already,” she sighs. This cynicism is the embodiment of the world of adulthood and death into which Bret now feels he’s been thrust permanently. His days as a kid are permanently over. This, of course, is what the whole party was a rehearsal for, but now it seems ugly and empty. As a wise woman once said, when they get what they want, they never want it again.

I reviewed episode four of The Shards for Decider.

FX‘s The Shards loves lingering on beautiful things that won’t last. Director Michael Uppdendahl’s lens luxuriates in the sight of a beaming, utterly fearless girl roller-disco dancing on her own in slow motion…on a circle of young, beautiful friends eating lunch, the camera whirling around and around them…on an incredible dancer commanding the camera…on a fast drive down a twisting, secret road…on a fallen model practicing her grand Oscar kiss-off…on a boy smelling his lost boyfriend’s jacket and crying. When this episode finds something nice to look at, it lets you know it, and does not let go, until it has to.

I reviewed episode 3 of The Shards for Decider.

Directed by frequent Ryan Murphy collaborator Michael Uppendahl, this episode lacks its predecessor’s copious film references and dreamy vibe. But it’s excellent at capturing the outrageous lives of hedonism, luxury, and unsupervised independence enjoyed by Bret and “the gang.” Drinking red wine in the hot tubs of houses blissfully unoccupied by parents might be a memorable evening for normal kids; for them, it was Tuesday.

The show’s deadpan cheesiness, meanwhile, is a hoot. The central-casting Satanic cult and its evil leader named (dun dun dunnnnnn!) Bruce (Gus Halper). Bret keeping a knife on his manuscript for self-defense. Susan narrating every detail of the Kellner family’s lives (Matt’s dad is played by an uncredited James Wolk) like she’s somehow the prosecuting attorney in his murder trial. Bret’s pretentious pronouncements about the perils of life in the Serial Killer Age…It’s funny! On purpose! 

It’s also sexy and sleazy and now and then creepy and occasionally, as in a striking composition that puts Bret’s face in the extreme foreground as Debbie does her makeup behind him, lovely. As is typically the case with Murphy ensembles, everyone in the cast appears to be having a ball with the material. I know I am.

I reviewed episode two of The Shards for Decider.

“It became clear to me after our second introduction that Robert Mallory was like a virus, a new kind of insidious, invading agent who was here to destroy the very cellular structure of my friends, my school, and me. He was up to something, and it was up to me to find out exactly what it was.” Herein, I believe, lies the secret of exactly how seriously you’re meant to take FX‘s The Shards. Feel how you will about Ryan Murphy and Bret Easton Ellis, the provocateurs who adapted the series from Ellis’s novel of the same name — itself a work of autofiction, juxtaposing details from Ellis’s real childhood with pure invention — but they understand how this sounds. 

These are the words of a teenager, Bret Easton Ellis’s fictional avatar in fact, declaring that another teenager is a virus out to destroy everything, And Only I Can Stop Him. It’s superhero dialogue, coming from the mouth of a kid who looks like Peter Parker, but enjoys luxury living like Jordan Belfort…or Patrick Bateman. And why has he decided that this newcomer to his clique is pure evil? Because the guy fibbed about, or just plain forgot, seeing Bret for five seconds at an opening-day screening of The Shining half a year earlier. The monster! 

It’s funny on purpose, is what I’m saying. If you want to appreciate The Shards, you’ll have to get on that level. 

I reviewed the premiere of The Shards for Decider. Fun show!