The Shards should be exactly my kind of television.
It’s 1981 Los Angeles. Everyone is beautiful, rich, sexually confused, and making questionable decisions while a serial killer known as the Trawler is casually terrorizing the city. It’s based on Bret Easton Ellis’s novel, and Ryan Murphy is involved because, apparently, the man hears “murder” and immediately clocks in. Visually, the whole thing looks like an old Calvin Klein ad wandered into a psychological thriller.
The concept? Great.
The execution? Well.
I really wanted to love The Shards. And visually, I kind of do. The clothes. The houses. The cars. The soundtrack. The hazy, expensive-looking version of early-'80s Los Angeles where apparently nobody has a curfew and every teenager looks like they already has an agent.
But then they start talking.
And suddenly I’m very aware that I am watching people act.
The Nepo Baby Cinematic Universe
Photos: Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images (left); Gerald Matzka/Getty Images (right).
Then there’s the casting choice that feels almost too perfectly Hollywood to be real.
Kaia Gerber, daughter of Cindy Crawford, plays Susan Reynolds. Homer Gere, son of Richard Gere, plays mysterious new student Robert Mallory. And here's the fun little Hollywood footnote: Crawford and Richard Gere were married in the '90s. So their children are now starring together in a television show about extremely privileged Los Angeles teenagers.
You genuinely couldn't write a better joke about Hollywood casting.
And before the nepo-baby defense committee assembles: having famous parents does not automatically mean you can't act. There are plenty of second-generation actors who are fantastic.
The problem comes when I'm watching a performance and thinking more about someone's IMDb family tree than the character they're supposed to be playing.
Gerber is undeniably perfect for the look of The Shards. She has that effortless, slightly detached cool-girl quality that makes complete sense in this glossy world. Gere certainly looks like the mysterious rich kid everyone becomes inexplicably obsessed with.
But looking like the character and disappearing into the character are two different things.
At times, both performances feel so restrained that I found myself wondering whether we were witnessing carefully calibrated '80s boredom or if someone had simply forgotten to tell them the cameras were rolling.
Meanwhile, Igby Rigney, who plays Bret, arrives with an actual résumé that includes Midnight Mass, The Midnight Club, and The Fall of the House of Usher. And you can feel the difference. There’s an ease to his performance that makes you forget you're watching someone perform.
That's what I want from the rest of the show.
Can We Cast Someone Whose Parents I Have to Google?
Hollywood keeps telling us it wants fresh faces.
Great.
Can they actually be fresh?
Because there is something mildly hilarious about producing a show centered on privileged Los Angeles teenagers and then casting the children of two celebrities who were once married to each other. Even the people behind the show have described the cast as part of a new generation of stars, while acknowledging the Gerber-Gere family connection.
Maybe that's intentional. Maybe the meta-ness is part of the fun.
But it also represents something bigger that has started bothering me about television and movies lately: Where are all the weird unknown actors?
Where's the 24-year-old who has been doing regional theater for six years?
Where's the girl whose mother is an accountant?
Where is somebody who had to submit 37 self-tapes from their bedroom before anyone learned their name?
Give me her.
And Yet...I'm Still Watching
Here's the annoying part.
I'm not turning it off.
Because underneath my complaints, there is a genuinely interesting show hiding in The Shards. The source material gives it sex, paranoia, obsession, privilege, identity, murder, and enough deeply damaged rich people to keep Ryan Murphy employed indefinitely.
And when the show works, it works.
I just wish the performances consistently matched how good everything around them looks.
Maybe the cast will settle into the characters. Maybe by the finale I'll be eating every word of this while dramatically deleting the article from the Tawny archive.
I hope so.
Because The Shards has the bones of something addictive.
I just wish Hollywood would occasionally remember that talent can also be hereditary from two completely unknown parents in Ohio.
The nepo babies will survive without every role. I promise.