Leo Lasdun's review of Ryan Murphy's adaptation of The Shards in The New Yorker lands on a precise diagnosis: Murphy has taken Ellis's metafictional thriller, a novel about the violence lurking beneath the surfaces of Reagan-era LA, and removed the violence that makes the surfaces meaningful. What's left is the aesthetic without the dread. It is a near-perfect illustration of what happens when literary IP moves through the prestige TV production pipeline.
The Adaptation as Lossy Compression
The Shards works as a novel because Ellis weaponizes the gap between his narrator's flat, brand-saturated descriptions and the horror accumulating beneath them. That gap requires a reader willing to sit in discomfort. Television, particularly Murphy's brand of it, has a different contract with its audience. It explains its own irony. Lasdun's description of the result as a 'Glee-ified' version captures what the compression loses: the unresolvable ambiguity that makes Ellis's prose feel like a trap. The same text, processed through a different distribution format, becomes a completely different object.
Where This Connects to the Wider Content Economy
This is not only a story about one adaptation. It is a story about what prestige IP development selects for. The works that survive the pipeline are those whose edge can be aestheticized and whose difficulty can be made pleasurable. The ones that don't are those whose difficulty is the point. Scott Belsky's essay on Precision Generative Workflows argues that the human craving for genuinely difficult art will intensify precisely because smooth, optimized content is becoming infinitely cheap to produce. Murphy's Shards is ahead of the curve: an AI-era artifact made by humans, already exhibiting the smoothing behavior that generative pipelines will industrialize. The question Ellis's novel asks, and the adaptation declines to answer, is what you find when you sand down to the wood.