HBO Developing TV Adaptation of The Shards From American Psycho Author

One of Bret Easton Ellis’ latest works is headed to the small screen. On Tuesday, reports revealed that The Shards, a podcast-turned-novel released by the American Psycho author, is in the works as a drama series at HBO. The podcast version of The Shards was released exclusively on Ellis’ Patreon account, with the book adaptation later released on January 17th of this year. Ellis would write and executive produce the series adaptation of The Shards alongside Nick Hall and Brian Young. 

The Shards would be the latest work of Ellis’ to be adapted onscreen, following 1987’s Less than Zero, 2000’s American Psycho, and 2008’s The Informers. 

What is The Shards about?

In The Shards, seventeen-year-old Bret is a senior at the exclusive Buckley prep school when a new student arrives with a mysterious past. Robert Mallory is bright, handsome, charismatic, and shielding a secret from Bret and his friends even as he becomes a part of their tightly knit circle. Bret’s obsession with Mallory is equaled only by his increasingly unsettling preoccupation with the Trawler, a serial killer on the loose who seems to be drawing ever closer to Bret and his friends, taunting them—and Bret in particular—with grotesque threats and horrific, sharply local acts of violence. The coincidences are uncanny, but they are also filtered through the imagination of a teenager whose gifts for constructing narrative from the filaments of his own life are about to make him one of the most explosive literary sensations of his generation. Can he trust his friends—or his own mind—to make sense of the danger they appear to be in? Thwarted by the world and by his own innate desires, buffeted by unhealthy fixations, he spirals into paranoia and isolation as the relationship between the Trawler and Robert Mallory hurtles inexorably toward a collision.

“I don’t imagine them coming to life because I’ve written them as novels and not as scripts,” Ellis previously told Interview Magazine about the adaptations of his work. “I’ve written many scripts and those are movies. The books are not movies and I approach scripts and novels in completely separate ways. Scripts are about structure and novels are about consciousness. I often imagine a script of mine coming to life because I wrote it to be (duh) a movie. I am always in conversations about actors and cinematographers even if the movie doesn’t get made—it’s collaborative, you need a lot of money to make it, you need a producer, you need a group of people who share your vision. With novels you’re on your own and you don’t have to engage with those things—it’s all about language and style. I can never picture what my narrators look like. It’s not what I’m focusing on. I don’t imagine them in movies—unless, however, I adapt one of the books. And on The Informers script, for instance, I kept picturing Josh Hartnett as the lead, and I pictured no one when I wrote the book.”

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h/t: Deadline