Ryan Murphy’s new thriller The Shards takes place in 1981 – but it’s about the present

Ryan Murphy directs 'The Shards,' a new psychological thriller on Disney+ based on Bret Easton Ellis's twenty twenty-three novel. Set in nineteen eighty-one, it follows a fictionalized young Ellis at an exclusive Los Angeles prep school, where a serial killer known as 'the Trawler' is targeting students. Per The Conversation, the show uses its historical setting to explore how contemporary anxieties about outsiders and social change manifest in paranoid suspicion—paralleling real-world political rhetoric about displacement and nostalgia for an idealized past.

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