Is ‘The Shards’ based on a true story? Real inspiration behind Ryan Murphy’s new thriller
FX recently premiered the highly anticipated ‘The Shards’ and released the first two episodes. The unexpected union of Ryan Murphy and novelist Bret Easton Ellis has left viewers speechless with their latest project. The storyline revolves around a group of high-school seniors set in Los Angeles in 1981. Shockingly, the community faces a series of shocking events involving a serial killer, ‘The Trawler,’ based on Ellis’ 2023 novel of the same name. While the book is classified as a “work of fiction,” it still somehow seems as if it is based on partial real-life incidents. This is because there are various findings, according to various Reddit discussions.
The lead character of the show, ‘The Shards’, is played by Igby Rigney, a young aspiring novelist named Bret Easton Ellis. Surprisingly, the author also graduated in 1982 from LA’s Buckley School, the same institute that Bret attended on ‘The Shards’. Notably, Bret’s close friends are based on Ellis’ former classmates. This includes Thom Wright (played by Graham Campbell), class president Susan Reynolds (played by Kaia Gerber), horse girl Debbie Schaffer (played by Hayes Warner), and mysterious newcomer Robert Mallory (played by Homer Gere). For the fans who might not already know, the author went to the Buckley School in Sherman Oaks, and it is the same school that various renowned personalities have attended. Alumni including Laura Dern, Paris Hilton, Paul Thomas Anderson, Kim Kardashian, Matthew Perry, Alyssa Milano, Nicole Richie, and more have attended the same institution over the years.
Interestingly, Ellis has not shared anything about his Buckley classmates or Bret’s fictionalized friends from ‘The Shards’; a few Reddit discussion threads have matched the characters to their possible real-life personalities. One of them is “Putting faces to names: The Shards” on a BEEPodcast thread. It features a number of comments and reactions from users, and it contains lots of pictures with names and detailed descriptions.
During his interview with i-D, Bret reflected on how the story came to be, “I was going online and I started looking for classmates that I had started to think about and I couldn’t find them.” He added, “I wanted so badly to find out what was going on in their lives, what was happening to them, and then I started thinking about the last year of high school. Then I started listening to all the music from that year. I started looking for all the places where we hung out (they’re all gone). I had a profound wave of nostalgia for that time. I started writing the book that night, and the next day I had 14 pages. It happened very quickly.”
