August is still weeks away, but FX has already decided the summer needs a little dread. The network dropped the first trailer for The Shards this week, and if the two-minute cut is any measure, Ryan Murphy's adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's prep-school thriller is arriving fully loaded: vintage Los Angeles, moneyed teenagers who have no business being left unsupervised, and a missing girl whose absence pulls the whole sun-bleached picture apart.
The novel — Ellis's first in years, published in 2023 — is set at a Buckley School-adjacent campus in 1981 and follows a narrator named Bret who watches his social world curdle around a new student and a string of disappearances. Murphy's translation keeps the period, the privilege, and the creeping sense that everyone here knows more than they are saying. The trailer confirms all three, plus a soundtrack choice that should land well with anyone who already owns the Stranger Things vinyl box set.
Murphy needs no introduction on this particular block. The producer has been synonymous with prestige-dark television since American Horror Story premiered in 2011, and his FX relationship is long enough to have its own Wikipedia section. Ellis, meanwhile, wrote the source novel that became American Psycho and spent three decades as American fiction's most reliable provocateur. The two of them in a room — or on a network — is a combination that sells itself.
The Shards premieres on FX on August 5 and streams on Hulu the same day.