Ryan Murphy’s New Show Is a Global Streaming Hit, but Fans Can’t Agree on Whether It’s Any Good

Ryan Murphy has spent decades turning true crime, camp horror, and glossy melodrama into some of television’s most talked-about programming, from ‘American Horror Story’ to ‘Glee.’ His latest project marks yet another tonal shift, this time adapting a novel that’s spent years being described as one of the more unsettling coming-of-age stories in modern fiction.

That project, ‘The Shards,‘ premiered on FX on August 5, bringing Bret Easton Ellis’s semi-autobiographical novel to the screen with Ellis himself co-creating alongside Murphy. Set in 1981 Los Angeles, the series follows a fictionalized 17-year-old version of Ellis, played by Igby Rigney, through his final year at the elite Buckley School, where a mysterious new student’s arrival coincides with a serial killer known as the Trawler stalking wealthy teenagers across the city.

That premise has translated into a genuine ratings phenomenon, even as reactions to the show itself remain sharply divided. Just one day after release, ‘The Shards’ became the No. 2 most-watched show in the United States on Disney+, according to FlixPatrol, while also landing in second place on Hulu’s Top 10 chart and third overall. That momentum has continued internationally, with the series ranking as the most-watched show globally on Disney+.

Despite that commercial success, critics have landed in mixed territory, with the show sitting at roughly 52 to 55 percent on Rotten Tomatoes depending on the review count at any given moment, alongside an even lower 35 percent audience score. The Rotten Tomatoes critic consensus describes the pairing of Murphy and Ellis as one that should elicit “magnanimously pulpy TV,” but instead relegates the show to “obtuse style with mildly entertaining substance.”

Reactions have varied wildly depending on the outlet. Collider’s Gabrielle Moss gave the series a 7 out of 10, praising its restraint compared to Murphy’s usual excess, writing that the show “plays its cards close to its chest, and hopes you care enough to lean in and read them.” ScreenRant’s Graeme Guttmann took a far harsher view, arguing that Murphy sanitizes Ellis’s novel for the screen, while Variety’s review called the casting of Robert Mallory misguided and criticized the decision to stretch Ellis’s original story into a multi-season format.

Other outlets landed somewhere in between, with RogerEbert.com calling it Murphy’s best work in over a decade, while The Hollywood Reporter described the season as “nostalgic, over-the-top and unsurprisingly uneven.” That range of reactions has made ‘The Shards’ something of a Rorschach test among critics, with almost every review agreeing on the show’s striking visuals and 1980s atmosphere while disagreeing entirely on whether the story underneath actually holds together.

‘The Shards’ arrives as just one piece of an already busy stretch for Murphy, who also has ‘American Horror Story’ returning to FX for its thirteenth season on September 24. That new installment is being billed as something of a greatest-hits season, bringing back franchise favorites including Sarah Paulson, Evan Peters, Angela Bassett, and Kathy Bates, alongside several others from across the anthology’s history.

Whether that track record continues to draw audiences despite critical hesitation remains an open question, but ‘The Shards’ has already proven Murphy’s brand still carries significant weight with streaming viewers regardless of what reviewers think.