My father once drove down the King’s Road with Marianne Faithfull and Terence Stamp in a paisley-painted Mini to buy a velvet suit from Granny Takes A Trip while high on acid. No, not really. I was always very disappointed with my parents’ ‘what it was really like in the 1960s’ anecdotes because basically they didn’t have any.
Now my own children are having similar problems with my anecdotes about the legendary 1980s. Yes, it’s true that I did go to see Duran Duran at the height of their fame, but only to keep my little sister company in a football stadium smelling of chips and fizzy pop and filled with screaming 12-year-old girls. Yes, I did wear eyeliner and white lipstick once, but I looked a prat. Yes, I did listen to lots of fashionable synth pop, like the Human League’s Dare. But I also listened to Dire Straits, because that was how it was.
Great decades are only really worth living through second time round through a haze of nostalgia and with a much more carefully curated soundtrack. That’s one reason I can so heartily recommend The Shards: finally the 1980s as you almost wish you had experienced them – endless sex with beautiful people, hot tubs, fast cars, cocktails, sharp tailoring, languidly drawled one-liners, tennis, horses…
Shards is a bit like a younger, hipper version of Riders
It’s a bit like a younger, hipper version of Riders, only without the self-deprecating humour and faint whiff of naffness. That’s because we’re not in Jilly Cooper’s jolly, bonktastic, tongue-in-cheek Rutshire but in Bret Easton Ellis’s oppressively chic, cruelly sardonic, exquisite but ghastly Los Angeles, recreated in his semi-autobiographical slasher novel The Shards. We’re in the early 1980s: the music is great, all the kids are beyond cool, and they live in beautiful houses with maids, pools and absent parents. But there’s a snake in the garden and it’s about to wreak havoc on this pampered, insolent community of tragically spoiled brats.
The author Bret is represented by a character called Bret (Igby Rigney) who provides the dry, knowing, wistful voice-over. Bret is writing a novel about his world – the last year at an elite prep school for kids of the rich and famous, some of them played by kids of the actual 1980s rich and famous. Supermodel Cindy Crawford’s daughter Kaia Gerber plays pouting, supermodelish Susan Reynolds; the mysterious, handsome and sinister new arrival Robert Mallory is played by Homer Gere, whose father is, of course, Charlie Sheen. Joke. But you see how meta the whole project is.
Anyway, this snake in the garden I mentioned… It is, as per usual, Bret Easton Ellis’s trademark MacGuffin: a savagely inventive serial killer. This one quickly acquires the nickname the Trawler because first he sneaks into your house and nicks all the fish in your tropical tank (to be disembowelled and served up later with your body, along with your other pets which he also kills); then when he’s ready to display your corpse, somewhere ostentatious like your tennis court, he wraps it all up in fishing nets.
Normally I dislike this sort of thing. I couldn’t even start Ellis’s American Psycho, let alone finish it. There is far too much violence in cable TV drama, often involving women being tortured and ritually murdered by serial killers. (I blame young female audiences. They’re the ones driving this masochistic trend.) But though the horror scenes are pretty graphic they’re somehow rendered bearable by the context because, a bit like the permanently drugged-up characters, you feel as if you’re experiencing everything at one remove.
I wouldn’t at all blame you if you don’t think it’s for you. But it’s easily the best drama on TV
That is, it’s real and simultaneously not real; intense and at the same time, yeah, whatever. Showrunner and co-director Ryan Murphy has captured perfectly the bizarre, unsettling register of this tainted paradise, where anything you want is yours, the drawback being that you can’t enjoy it because it’s never enough, and anyway emotions are so uncool and best suppressed with another quaalude.
This is a world where one second girls can be speculating on the final moments of the latest classmate to have gone missing, presumed dead, and next, in almost the same breath, asking with the same degree of seriousness: ‘Does this lipgloss make me look fat?’ It’s a world of pure surface – lovingly captured in close-ups of jacuzzi jets blasting into ultra-blue water and shiny black vinyl discs about to play some classic 1980s banger and the fetishistically observed inner workings of a C90 cassette in a cassette player recording the screams of a terrified torture victim being forced to eat his tropical fish while LSD is injected into his neck.
Very American Psycho revisited in other words: high fashion meets pornographic ultraviolence. I wouldn’t at all blame you if you don’t think it’s for you. But it’s easily the best drama on television.
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