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The Shards Builds Its 1981 Mystery Around a Killer Who Never Existed

Putri ArdhanaPublished 7d ago3 min readBased on 10 sources
The Shards Builds Its 1981 Mystery Around a Killer Who Never Existed
Image by Squirrel_photos from Pixabay

The Trawler does not exist. That is the point.

The central killer in The Shards is invented. The FX television series, adapted from Bret Easton Ellis's 2023 novel, is set in 1981 during the senior year of its teenage narrator, Bret, at a private college preparatory school in Los Angeles, where young people are being murdered around the city by a figure called the Trawler, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Igby Rigney plays Bret, the authorial avatar for Ellis himself. Homer Gere plays Robert Mallory, a charming and secretive newcomer who enters Bret's circle and draws suspicion as the killings continue.

The circle around them is filling out. Wes Bentley plays Terry, Debbie's father, while Owen Painter plays Matt Kellner, who becomes a victim of the killer, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Susan is the group's queen-bee high schooler. Jordan Roth plays Steven Reinhardt, a role that marks his television debut, according to FX.

Producers chose to fictionalise the killer. Rather than depict a real murderer active in that era, such as the Night Stalker, the production created the Trawler to avoid involving real victims. In both the book and the show, the Trawler's victims are a different demographic from the real killer active in Los Angeles during Ellis's youth, and the killer is never identified.

Behind the camera, The Shards is an FX/Hulu series from Ryan Murphy and Bret Easton Ellis. FX describes it as a seductive drama series from executive producer Ryan Murphy, according to FX. Murphy, Ellis and Brad Simpson are executive producers.

Ellis kept a short credit list. He sold the book and wrote the first two episodes of the FX series, a lightly involved role he detailed in July, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Murphy has spoken of a three-season plan for the story.

For viewers trying to keep track, that structure explains the mystery. The question is not which real case the show is solving. It is what the invented killer is doing to Bret's final year of school.

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