Ryan Murphy “Glee”-ifies Bret Easton Ellis’s Thriller “The Shards”

Equally lethal are Bret’s writerly aspirations. His ability to spin stories about the Trawler means that he is destabilized by the crimes in a way that his classmates aren’t. The achievement of the book is that Ellis (the real one) encases us in Bret (the character)’s obsessively narrativizing consciousness, so that his feverish pursuit of the “truth” rubs off on us. We, too, become fixated on whether small details might reveal Robert to be a murderer. Like Bret, we are eager to uncover the dark secrets of Robert’s past, but as the book goes on we are also creepingly aware that Bret might be more interested in a good story than he is in reality.

Murphy’s adaptation is a somewhat different product. Preserved from Ellis’s novel, and generally well-rendered, are the basic conceits and settings: a rich, secretly gay high-school senior named Bret Ellis is part of a friend group that integrates (or resists integrating) the newcomer Robert Mallory, all the while circled by news of the Trawler. Bret is played by Igby Rigney, whose distant, sneery monotone recalls the voice of the real-life Ellis. The rest of the cast, which includes Kaia Gerber and Homer Gere (the children of the eighties supermodel Cindy Crawford and the actor Richard Gere, respectively), is serviceable and occasionally great, but Rigney is the standout, and his presence or absence, from scene to scene, is starkly felt. The series is gorgeously shot, full of perfectly appointed eighties interiors, and has a soundtrack—Blondie, Fleetwood Mac, Rick James, and the Beach Boys—that evidently cost a fortune.

Ryan Murphy claims that he’s always “worshipped” Ellis’s work, and, indeed, one can imagine why the creator of “Glee,” a show about the agonies and the ecstasies of high-school drama, might find the adolescent milieu of “The Shards” compelling. But where “Glee” is a sentimental artifice, a snow-globe world in which teen-age angst and melodrama are of planetary importance, Ellis’s vision of teen-agers, as painted in “Less Than Zero,” his icy début, is numb, droll, sadistic, and alienated. In 2011, Ellis tweeted, “I like the idea of ‘Glee’ but why is it that every time I watch an episode I feel like I’ve stepped into a puddle of HIV?” In his own manner, Ellis may have summed up the disparity between his and Murphy’s sensibilities perfectly. As a novel, “The Shards” is an ambitious metafictional thriller-slash-gay-awakening story, and although, unlike “Less Than Zero,” it’s plot-forward and emotionally intense, Murphy’s attempt to adapt it has, to some degree, amounted to a “Glee”-ification.

Maximalist drama is Murphy’s signature style, and, to that end, he makes several stagy alterations to the novel’s subplots. One of Bret’s primary love interests, Ryan Vaughn, with whom he shares a tender weekend in the novel, is condemned, in the show, to a silly B plot involving (straight) porn and implausible blackmail. There’s a televised dance-off host’s short-lived and pointless baby-mama drama, and the addition of a bizarre kidnapping farce that, despite Ivy Wolk’s expressive and funny performance as its victim, morphs into a lame homecoming-queen makeover story before just being dropped. Perhaps most radical is the show’s portrayal of Bret’s relationship with Terry Schaffer, the father of Bret’s girlfriend, Debbie. In both the novel and the show, Terry is a famous movie producer who, though only nominally closeted, is still married to Debbie’s mother. At first, he comes across as a kind of quasi-predator—flirty and a little gross, but basically harmless. Then Terry takes an interest in Bret. From his daughter, he’s heard about Bret’s novel in progress, also called “Less Than Zero.” He wants to buy Bret lunch, to pick his brain, to encourage him to develop the novel into a screenplay. Then, Terry wants quid-pro-quo sex. In the show, Terry, played by Wes Bentley, is a cartoon creep, wearing a villainous grin as he instigates his sexual encounter with Bret. (We don’t see it; instead, much of the explicit passage from the novel is read verbatim by Rigney, in his flat voice-over.) The big departure comes in the show’s depiction of the aftermath: “I didn’t understand adult things, I just thought I did,” Bret reflects. “I’ve learned through time that many young people make the same mistake.”