Is Bret Easton Ellis’ FX Drama A True Story?

FX’s “The Shards,” which premiered with its first two episodes on August 5, marks the twisted union of TV mogul Ryan Murphy and novelist Bret Easton Ellis. As you might expect from such a melding of minds, the finished product is slick, stylized, and horrific — but you might be surprised to learn that it’s also, at least partially, true.

“The Shards,” the story of a tight-knit group of high school seniors in 1981 Los Angeles whose community is terrorized by a serial killer known as “The Trawler,” is based on Ellis’ 2023 novel of the same name. The book is technically classified as a work of autofiction, a genre in which the author blurs the line between fantasy and reality, incorporating elements of their own life into a story that’s otherwise fictitious.

That’s why the main character of “The Shards,” played on the show by Igby Rigney, is a young aspiring novelist named — wait for it — Bret Easton Ellis. The author indeed graduated in 1982 from Los Angeles’ Buckley School, the same institution attended by Bret on “The Shards,” and Bret’s close friends are based on Ellis’ former classmates. There’s All-American heartthrob Thom Wright (Graham Campbell), class president Susan Reynolds (Kaia Gerber), horse girl Debbie Schaffer (Hayes Warner), and mysterious newcomer Robert Mallory (Homer Gere).

While Ellis has never specified which of his Buckley classmates inspired Bret’s fictionalized friend group on “The Shards,” there are entire Reddit threads devoted to matching the fake personas to their real-life counterparts. Truly, the lengths some people have gone to connect the dots are almost worthy of their own Netflix documentary.

In a 2023 interview with Vanity Fair, Ellis recalled hearing from one of his former classmates over Facebook about her fictionalized portrayal in the book. As Ellis tells it, the message read: “Of all the names you could have chosen, the name I hate the most is Debbie.”

In addition to changing people’s names to protect their privacy, Ellis also made Bret an only child in “The Shards”; as he explained on his podcast during the novel’s inception, his real-life sisters had previously taken issue with him writing about them in other works.