If we learned anything from Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero, it’s that he doesn’t shy away from depressed and drug-hungry teen characters. Ellis returns to that territory with The Shards, the autofictional story he introduced as a podcast in 2020 and published as a novel in 2023. Like Less Than Zero, it unfolds in 1980s Los Angeles, where the senior year of one Bret Ellis, at an exclusive private school, is unsettled by the arrival of a new student, Robert Mallory. There’s drinking, absent parents, and enormous amounts of cocaine—as well as a serial killer who circles Ellis and his friends. “This story is about a group of young, beautiful people who are about to embark on the world, and there is a killer that hunts them,” the executive producer Brad Simpson told The Guardian. “There’s an obvious metaphor to Aids in the 1980s for that.” Ellis developed the series with Ryan Murphy, casting Kaia Gerber (Cindy Crawford’s daughter), Homer Gere (Richard Gere’s son), Igby Rigney, Hayes Warner, and Graham Campbell. —Jeanne Malle