The Shards

The Shards is beautifully curated, shot and scored.

When the series lets itself slide into the novel’s spirit of drifting anomie, all sensation and ironized reflection, it produces something vivid and memorable, despite the too-muchness.

Totally trashy but often entertaining, “The Shards” is Ryan Murphy at his Ryan Murphyest.

It’s often absurd and always melodramatic — not in itself a criticism — but if you’re in the market for a slick miniseries about cocaine-sniffing kids (and adults), murder, animal mutilation, sex and sports cars in New Wave L.A., with cameos from Hamburger Hamlet and Orange Julius and an excellent selection of period songs on the soundtrack, you can’t do better than this.

Rigney’s knowingly performative lead turn is solid, and there’s thankfully more on Murphy’s mind than his sloppy “Substance” knock-off, “The Beauty.” But watching the first season is like watching someone lose interest in a story as they’re telling it.

“The Shards” is more problematic: Mr. Ellis has been recycling his depraved teen angels long enough that the show, a collaboration with Ryan Murphy, becomes parody, even comedy.

Unlike American Psycho, Easton Ellis’s most famous output, there isn’t a shred of black humour. It also pales in comparison to Less Than Zero, its closest cousin and a novel which managed to write about bored characters without ever being boring.

Total failure. How could you make a thriller with good looking people in posh Beverly Hills BORING? Terrible writing. Acting beyond bad. No gorgeous homes.