When it comes to stories of wealth, TV has lately had an excess of excess. It’s given us the rapacious billionaires of “Succession,” the idle rich of “The White Lotus,” the merely prosperous of “The Five-Star Weekend.” But one genre was focused on materialism and its discontents long before the current trend: the teen soap.
Maybe because adolescence is a time of life attuned to social hierarchy, teen dramas — from “Beverly Hills, 90210” through “Euphoria” — are often more class-conscious, more aware of the repercussions of having and having not, than their adult counterparts. This is certainly true of two new series, “The Shards” and “Sterling Point.”
The teenage victims of affluence-poisoning in FX’s “The Shards” came of age when cash was cool, at the beginning of the 1980s, in a swanky Los Angeles milieu drenched in Giorgio fragrance and up to its sinuses in cocaine. Their problems and conflicts are those of many TV teens — dating, jealousy, the homecoming-court election — but these are also heightened by a bloody complication: a serial killer, who is cutting a bloody swath through the population of the young and fabulous.
“The Shards,” which premieres on FX and Hulu on Wednesday night, is adapted from a 2023 novel by Bret Easton Ellis (“American Psycho”), who created the series with the ubiquitous Ryan Murphy. Given their similar storytelling penchants — an interest in status and society, a taste for lurid excess — it’s surprising they haven’t worked together before.
But “The Shards” does not appeal only to Murphy’s splattery side, as showcased in his recent franchise “Monster” and in his earlier horror-com series “Scream Queens.” Murphy is often at his best dealing with the histrionic emotions of teens. His first series, “Popular” (1999-2001), remains one of the most inventive and funny takes on high school social climbing. And while “Glee” (2009-15) was the definition of erratic, it could be affecting and psychologically acute.
Given the provenance, you can bet that “The Shards” is not the nostalgic ’80s of “Stranger Things.” It’s raw, mean and cut-glass sharp, with a soundtrack of chilly, sleek New Wave. Our guide is a young Bret Ellis (Igby Rigney), an aspiring writer and the child of absent parents, who narrates his own story in a refined drawl.
Bret is well-connected, self-assured and a studious fan of Joan Didion. He’s tight with the school royalty, Susan Reynolds (Kaia Gerber) and Thom Wright (Graham Campbell), and is dating Debbie Schaffer (Hayes Warner), a movie producer’s daughter (though Bret is gay, a secret he has to guard carefully in the early Reagan era). That producer, Terry (Wes Bentley), is a predatory sleazebag, but he intuits something essential about Bret: “You understand adult things.”
Bret also nurses two obsessions. He is morbidly fascinated by a string of murders by “The Trawler,” a killer so named for a grisly ritual involving fish. And he is suspicious of a new kid in town, Robert Mallory (Homer Gere), a cocky, handsome enigma who threatens Bret’s social position and who Bret begins to suspect may be behind the murders himself.
We don’t know how much we should trust Bret’s instincts, or his narration. But his voice-over tells us a lot about the kind of story he sees himself living in: a sort of “Great Gatsby” West, with himself as Nick Carraway. (The real-life Ellis rendered a version of that story in his debut novel, “Less Than Zero,” which the Bret of “The Shards” is writing and trying to get optioned as a movie.)
The “Gatsby” aspirations, like F. Scott Fitzgerald himself, do not survive the move to Hollywood unscathed. Sometimes “The Shards” feels like a study of superficiality and sometimes like the thing itself.
Still, especially in the early going, it’s an observant, literate portrait of an adolescence kissed by privilege and stalked by death. Unlike many teen dramas, it doesn’t posit any member of its core friend group as the moral center; these are haughty high school demigods, neither relatable nor trying to be. (One of their fun friend-group activities is holding a secret vote on which of their number everyone believes is the poorest.)
But they can surprise. Susan proves smarter and less shallow than genre conventions would dictate. And though you might assume the handsome jock Thom would be the boorish Tom Buchanan figure, he turns out to be tragic and lost, haunted by his father’s abandonment, baffled and frustrated by Robert’s sophisticated charisma.
This character study, however, gets thrown into a blender with a grisly murder story, and as the nine-episode season goes on, the grotesque and exaggerated elements start to dominate the concoction. The adult characters are cartoonish (although Jordan Roth has a Bowie-like alien allure as Terry’s refined, frustrated assistant). And the story, self-contained in Ellis’s novel, feels overextended as it sets up for a multi-season run.
All this money, meanness and mutilation: Are we meant to see it as a comment on the corruption underlying sun-kissed paradise? Is our view shaped by yet-to-be-revealed distortions in Bret’s narrative? In a limited run, these questions might have resolved to some kind of satisfaction. But as the season ends, with “The Shards” escalating its cruel, gruesome turns, it’s hard to imagine wanting to return for another year at the same lunch table.
“Sterling Point,” whose first season is now live on Amazon Prime Video, also involves the teen-drama staple of the outsider who shakes up a social circle. But it inverts the structure of shows like “The O.C.” and “Beverly Hills, 90210,” which were about middle- or working-class newcomers in an upper-crust community. Here, the fish out of water is rich.
Annie (Ella Rubin), a smart, tightly-wound student, lives with her brother, Connor (Keen Ruffalo), and her adoptive widower father, Steven (Jay Duplass), in a Brooklyn townhouse that looks posh enough to break Zillow. Her high-achieving life is disrupted by surprising news: Her estranged grandfather has died, leaving her and Connor the ownership of an island in Canada. She also comes across a trove of letters from him, which allude cryptically to a family mystery that has been kept from her.
Unsettled by the revelation, and evidently backed by a bottomless line of credit, she jets up north to investigate her inheritance. She hires a seaplane, piloted by a young wisecracking local, Ellis (Jacob Whiteduck-Lavoie) — you do not need to have watched many teen shows for him to set off your potential-love-interest detector — and finds a charming rustic getaway, like Widow’s Bay with no undead and fewer wrinkles.
In her grandfather’s ramshackle cottage, she finds an occupant, Ramona (Amélie Hoeferle), with whom she shares a connection (questionably surprising, definitely spoiler-alerted by Amazon). Settling in to find out what her family has been hiding from her, Annie falls in with a quirky group of local youths who work in the service business attending to the fancy summer people.
“Sterling Point” is another teen story about love and lies, but it is as affable and charming as “The Shards” is steely and intimidating. It’s created by Megan Park, who wrote and directed the movie “My Old Ass” and acted in the aughts teen drama series “The Secret Life of the American Teenager.” The producers of “Sterling Point” include Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage of “Gossip Girl.”
“Sterling Point” is all about secrets and revelations, and they pile up high over the eight-episode first season. (Annie herself keeps secret the fact that she now owns Sterling Point and could upend her new friends’ lives and livelihoods with one call to a real-estate agent.) But the twists don’t really dominate the show, which instead thrives on character and performance.
Rubin captures the protagonist’s elder-daughter stress; Hoeferle plays Ramona as a ball of anger with a vulnerable core; and Ruffalo is adept at comic relief. (Connor breaks the premise-establishing news with a hearty “’Sup, pimps! Grandpa died!”) The grown-up performers include a soulful Jeffrey Dean Morgan as a local boat-rental proprietor with, you guessed it, a secret.
Like its forebears — you might pick up a dash of “Gilmore Girls,” a smidgen of “Dawson’s Creek” — “Sterling Point” is chock-full of characters who are a little more precocious than plausible but amusing enough that you don’t mind. (Bo Bragason is another standout as Oona, a gay British heartbreaker who takes Annie under her wing.)
As its wayward adolescents do, “Sterling Point” gets by on charm; its tart voice and character appeal carry it through the season’s back half, which at times tips over into gooey melodrama. But having a foundation of characters you want to spend time with sets it up better as a continuing series. The teens are what makes you stick with a teen drama for the long haul, not the drama.
And like predecessors including “The O.C.” (which Schwartz created), “Sterling Point” is attuned to the class dynamics between its characters without being simplistic. The working-stiff locals are allowed to be messy; the affluent summer people are allowed to be sympathetic. Annie and Ramona, after a rough start, find commonalities, but “Sterling Point” is not naïve about the power and advantages that Annie’s upbringing gave her.
The rich are indeed different, the show says. But mainly because they own the island.
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