The Shards TV Show Is a Great Advert for Reading

As someone who has claimed The Shards is Bret Easton Ellis’s masterpiece, I was anxious, in both senses, to watch the TV adaptation.

Hence after waiting for all the episodes to ‘drop’, I subscribed to Disney Plus just so I could ‘binge’ the whole thing.

And, like almost everything now, it was a tremendous disappointment. Of course, I didn’t expect it to be exactly like the novel, but to me it captured nothing of the book’s essence. Less than zero, one might even say.

It didn’t have to be this way. Cool pop songs and seductive images imbue Ellis’s novel, which should give TV a head start. And indeed there are plenty of songs and some decent visuals in the show. But the creators seem to be going for an ice-cold 80s pastiche, rather than the warm, hazy nostalgia Ellis captures in the book.

Because despite the gory murders and unnecessary amounts of gay sex (admittedly I speak as an extremely alpha heterosexual male) the book makes you want to be there at the Buckley School with Bret and all his rich-kid friends. Not for the Quaaludes, cocaine, and sex (even the straight stuff), believe it or not, but for that strange mixture of coolness, strong emotions, hope, and possibility that is youth.

Somehow the show misses this in a series of disconnected scenes with underdeveloped characters and miscast actors. True, the Bret actor is good, looking and sounding uncannily like a young Ellis. Susan is at least beautiful, albeit in a slightly conventional, my-mom-is-literally-Cindy-Crawford kind of way. But Robert and Thom are completely wrong, and others forgettable, with the notable exception of Wes Bentley’s portrayal of the sleazy Terry.

Still, no cast is ever going to match a reader’s vague mental projections, and this alone wouldn’t have been a deal-breaker. But everything else is also wrong.

Ironically they try to cram in too much of the book in pure content terms, via a voiceover of almost Scorsese-esque loquacity, but in doing so they miss the vibe. And vibe, with Ellis, is everything. Indeed he described his debut, Less Than Zero, as a ‘vibe novel’.

I’m not saying this is a thing easily captured or even described. It’s something to do with detached irony mixed with aching sincerity, lots of ambiguity, often nostalgia, and simply beautiful writing. Perhaps it can’t even be named in English. One turns, improbably, to the Germans and their ‘Sehnsucht’.

The roots of this word are in yearning combined with sickness or addiction. I have seen it described as an ‘addiction to longing itself’, and that is a pretty good description of the magic of The Shards. The novel, but sadly not the show.

These failings are quite surprising when one considers that Ellis himself is the executive producer. However, it seems after giving his approval based on the first two episodes, he had little more to do with the show. This might explain the failures in tone, which apparently I’m not the only one to notice. A quick AI search tells me:

While the book is heavy with mature regret, shame, and memory, Ellis acknowledged on his podcast that the show naturally over-indexed on the campy, sexy, and hyper-stylised elements of the 1980s—something he anticipated when handing the keys over to the executive producers

I suspect Ellis could have done a better job with closer involvement. But really the show is a great advert for reading. In books like The Shards and Lunar Park, and to a slightly lesser extent American Psycho, Ellis relies on the kind of ambiguity that lends itself to prose fiction, but is near-impossible on film, for the simple reason that the latter medium demands that everything be concrete and real.

This element will always be absent from any adaption, as will the humour of the prose itself, and the neurotic internal monologue, to which no voiceover can really do justice. The more VO they use, the more you think ‘I could just read the book.’ Which is, of course, exactly what you should do.

Episode four begins with a clear parody of American Psycho. The movie of American Psycho, that is. Which itself, while appealing in some ways, didn’t come very close to the genius of the book. The film then led to a meme, and one suspects in the Shards TV show we are getting a parody of a meme, taken from a film, based on a book. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that the whole thing feels hollow.

You can’t force people to read, and the decline of the publishing industry doesn’t help, but it is frustrating knowing there is a world of riches that awaits anyone who makes the slight effort to turn off this kitsch, flat, borderline slop, and pick up the book.

Unlike the tragic yearning of our German friends for the ineffable, books are still here, and—like a Bret Easton Ellis protagonist describing his teenage crush—they are totally effable.

Read my original review of the The Shards book here.