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A fruitful collaboration between Ryan Murphy and Bret Easton Ellis sounds, at once, inevitable and impossible. Murphy is a maximalist in every sense—a superproducer pumping out show after operatic show, writing characters who say the quiet part of every story out loud—and one of TV’s most influential promoters of inclusive, identity-politics-driven programming. Ellis, for his part, is known for the minimalistic prose of his generation-defining debut novel, Less Than Zero, and a more recent culture-warrior phase in which he has inveighed against the same “fake-woke corporate culture” within the entertainment industry that some might say Murphy epitomizes. On the other hand, both men are inveterate provocateurs, unafraid to alienate audiences and fascinated by the psychology of psycho killers (see: Ellis’ American Psycho and a huge chunk of Murphy’s output) and the interplay between pop culture and real life. Born on the boomer-Generation X cusp, they also remember what it was like to grow up gay in the ’80s.

In The Shards, which the two adapted from Ellis’ 2023 novel, the synergy among their experiences outweighs but doesn’t erase the irreconcilability of their perspectives. The story at its surface, an autofictional but otherwise familiar account of a serial killer stalking students at Ellis’ high school in 1981, gleams with the stylish production design, savvy genre pastiche, and elaborate set pieces for which Murphy is known. Yet it’s clear the show, premiering with two episodes on FX and Hulu on Aug. 5, has greater ambitions. In the connections it makes to cultural touchstones of its period and voiceover narration from a present-day Bret, The Shards attempts to say something profound about the transition from youth to adulthood. Blame a mismatched creative team or the visual medium’s inherent privileging of images over ideas; the shallow stuff wins out.

Like Less Than Zero—and in some ways a prequel to that novel, which took place during a college break, though Bret (played by an unnervingly self-possessed Igby Rigney) is also writing the book while this story unfolds—The Shards follows a clique of rich, debauched teens in L.A. Bret is noncommittally dating Debbie (rising pop star Hayes Warner), a ruthless go-getter, while secretly hooking up with guys. Their best friends are the class golden couple, gorgeous student body president Susan (Kaia Gerber), who wins every popularity contest even though she’d prefer not to, and Thom (Graham Campbell), an all-American dreamboat whose sadness no one perceives beneath an expression of what Bret calls “intriguing blankness.” Whether it’s the love Bret harbors for Susan or a fundamental lack of attraction to women in general that keeps him distant for Debbie is a question that lingers in the background as his identity crisis deepens. 

Senior year is starting and the group’s parents have long since checked out. (Bret’s are apparently vacationing overseas.) Which suits the performatively jaded teens, who chain-smoke at restaurants with white tablecloths and traverse the city without curfew or constraint. Only Debbie’s monstrous family enters the frame. Her father, Terry (Wes Bentley), is a stock predatory movie producer with an eye for underage boys. His wife, Liz (Evan Rachel Wood), is a sneak preview of Debbie’s future, self-medicating with drugs, alcohol, and wrathful outbursts. The fourth member of the household is Terry’s lurking aide, an androgynous aesthete named Steven (theater producer Jordan Roth, playing up the character’s feline strangeness). When the situation calls for a responsible adult, these are not the people you want on hand.

They’re who the kids are stuck with, though, when a girl’s mangled body is found fastened to a tennis net and their classmates start disappearing. Bret is certain that the handsome new boy in school, Robert Mallory (Homer Gere), is the culprit. But his logic—that Robert must be a killer because he denies having been at the screening of The Shining where Bret first spotted him—is pretty flimsy. For some reason, Bret can’t get his friends to care about the murders. They’re too busy planning homecoming festivities and angling to get on dance-contest TV shows. Maybe their denial can be shrugged off as typical teen self-involvement, but it doesn’t explain why he seems more invested in the case than police and even some parents of the missing.         

The Shards is dense with references. To make sense of the show beyond the plot’s generic teenage politicking and serial-killer thrills, you must know that The Shining is a horror story about a writer becoming violently unhinged; that its other Jack Nicholson footnote, Chinatown, is synonymous with systemic evil too entrenched to fight; that the financial disaster that was Michael Cimino’s 1980 feature Heaven’s Gate symbolizes the end of New Hollywood’s auteur-driven ’70s renaissance, leaving the industry to chase youthful faces and shiny trends. (Bret gives a Patrick-Bateman-esque monologue about how music videos are the future of art.) The casting piles new signifiers atop the source material. Gerber is the spookily identical daughter of Cindy Crawford, the ultimate Gen X beauty. Gere shares a square jaw with his father, Richard, whose breakthrough movie, American Gigolo—another tale of sex and murder in L.A., whose writer-director, Paul Schrader, worked with Ellis on The Canyons—was released just in time to be referenced by The Shards’ characters. Richard Gere was married to Crawford in the early ’90s. Gerber and Homer Gere don’t share any parents, but the connection adds a pseudo-incestuous twinge to their characters’ mutual attraction. Dig deeper, and you’ll find that Homer Gere’s mother, the actor Carrie Lowell, was once married to Griffin Dunne, the nephew of Joan Didion, whose work both Ellis and his Shards alter ego idolize.

Because so much of the meaning here resides in allusions that will elude most viewers under 40, Murphy and Ellis have essentially made two shows in one—an arch teen murder soap in the vein of Riverdale-Pretty Little Liars, and something more layered and harder to pin down for the older crowd. While the former benefits from the sensory intensity of Murphy’s storytelling (The Shards’ swimming pools achieve the incandescent blueness of Donald Trump’s Reflecting Pool dreams), and Ellis’ influence seems to have reined in some of his co-creator’s usual excesses, only the latter feels like something new. Yet the more thoughtful elements remain at the margins. It’s intriguing when the narrator says, for instance, “Matt had never felt about me the way I felt about him, which would be a recurring theme for the rest of my life.” The older Bret’s wistfulness, his frustration with a precocious teen Bret who traded his childhood innocence for an adult author’s life before he’d developed the self-knowledge that comes with genuine maturity, peeks through the surface without quite penetrating it.

The Shards unravels in its final few episodes. One plays on the name of the crew’s hangout, Hamburger Hamlet, drawing Murphy-ish parallels between the characters and Shakespeare’s tragic personages that are so overwrought, they can’t be salvaged by self-awareness. The bigger disappointment is a bombshell ending, albeit a narratively ambiguous one, that fizzles rather than explodes. The psychological escalation that’s supposed to lead us there never fully happens. This show about the consequences of limited introspection suffers them as well.

Abdul El-Sayed, a rabble-rousing populist and former public health official, just barely eked out a primary victory Tuesday in Michigan over a centrist rival who was the pick of Washington Democrats to keep a must-hold Senate seat. It was a bad night for the Democratic Establishment, who see the outcome as a major setback to their party's dreams of clawing back control of the Upper Chamber for the final two years of President Donald Trump’s presidency. 

But El-Sayed’s squeaker win was not what he or his allies were forecasting as recently as Tuesday morning. For weeks, most polling indicated Michiganders were strongly trending toward El-Sayed, who would be the first Muslim Senator if he prevails in November over former Rep. Mike Rogers. Even still, this outcome was not something many foresaw as recently as last year. El-Sayed managed to captured the broad, bipartisan frustration that established leaders are not hearing voters’ concerns. 

Strategists are still looking at the data but some top-line folks clearly came out winners—and others losers.

WINNER: El-Sayed

Even if he fell short of expectations, the podcasting populist still had the primary outcome he was counting on. El-Sayed has been planning this moment for a while. He ran for Governor in 2018, another wave year for Democrats, but lost his primary to the current Governor, Gretchen Whitmer. 

As TIME’s Nik Popli reported from Michigan earlier this summer, El-Sayed is using his do-over to run against both parties at the same time. He blasted the wealthy, lashed the corporations, and decried the whole system as rigged. In many ways, he was channeling a lefty version of Trump.

El-Sayed, whose surprising rise prompted state senator Mallory McMorrow to suspend her campaign before voting began, is on the cusp of being the latest avatar for the brand of progressive and populist politics promoted by supporters like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Sen. Bernie Sanders. That instant credibility may boost El-Sayed nationally, but risks turning off voters in Michigan, which is precisely what Rep. Haley Stevens warned of during her unsuccessful primary against El-Sayed.

LOSER: Stevens

She had almost every on-paper advantage: a seat in the House, proximity to donors and advocacy groups, a policy wonk’s eye, and an affable every-woman folksiness. But CVs don’t always translate to votes.

Stevens, a former campaign aide to Hillary Clinton and Obama, couldn’t translate her natural political instinct as an operative to convincing a statewide electorate that she deserved their votes. Sometimes, her comments seemed to wander. Her mind moved faster than her lips. And her critics—in not-so-subtly-gendered language—mocked her accent.

Her defeat Tuesday cuts short her time in public office. At least for now.

WINNERS: Populists

The frustrations with the status quo helped El-Sayed, for sure. But it also reflects the true sentiment of how Americans are feeling right now. According to Gallup polling, just 23% of Americans are satisfied with how things are going. With that level of angst, it’s little wonder that Michiganders opted to go with someone calling for remaking the whole system over an incrementalist and pragmatist who pitched herself as someone who can fix the system from the inside.

But, again, this result in Michigan may be a complicating factor as Democrats try to figure out their next leaders. The 2028 presidential primary is already shaping up as yet another soul-searching moment for Democrats, pitting the disparate ideological camps and competing personalities against each other. But winning primaries, even in swing states, doesn’t necessarily mean much when it comes to assembling a broader coalition. As one Democratic strategist told me before polls closed on Tuesday, the night “gives 2028-ers the wrong idea about everything.”

LOSER: AIPAC

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee became an unlikely flashpoint in Michigan. The pro-Israel group has been spending big for several cycles to support allies of Israel and counter increasingly anti-Israel sentiments in the Democratic Party. El-Sayed’s views there left little doubt which side AIPAC would be supporting.

The group spent a record $30 million to help Stevens, an outlay that fed El-Sayed’s characterization of his opponent as little more than a mouthpiece for her deep-pocketed supporters. 

While the group is nominally focused on promoting the relationship between the United States and Israel, its advertising focus seldom mentions Israel. In fact, a New York Times analysis of AIPAC’s ads since April of 2022 found 109 ads. Just six mention Israel. 

WINNER: CAIR

Michigan is home to one of the nation’s largest and most politically engaged Muslim communities. And one of its most important civic engagement groups, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, pulled a last-minute flex in the final hours of the race.

On the eve of Tuesday’s primary, CAIR began a robocall effort that reached more than 13,000 Muslim Michigan households, where roughly 29,000 mail-in ballot recipients are registered. Another 19,000 low-propensity Muslim voters got calls.

Given El-Sayed’s narrow win, that push looks even more impactful, allowing the country’s largest Muslim civil rights groups to more firmly showcase its power in Michigan, as it finds itself targeted on multiple fronts in some red states. 

LOSERS: Establishment Democrats

Stevens was the undisputed choice of the Democratic Establishment. She was a swing state Democrat who previously won on the same ballot as Trump. She had been through the vetting, could raise money, and seemed a practical choice to hold the seat of retiring Democratic Sen. Gary Peters. 

But Washington insiders’ efforts to help Stevens actually worked against her in a year when Democratic voters were more aligned with El-Sayed’s contempt for the Establishment. That anger found a vessel in El-Sayed and a target in Stevens. Even though Democratic leaders didn't get their way, that doesn't mean they're giving up on Michigan. Quickly after El-Sayed's primary victory became clear, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chair, released a statement of support. “We look forward to working with Abdul and Democrats across Michigan to win this seat in November," they said.

ACTING LIKE WINNERS: Republicans

Senate Republicans have been rightly nervous about holding their narrow majority. El-Sayed’s nomination takes away some of that stress. While Michigan is expected to be a close race, Republicans were a lot more eager to run against El-Sayed than Stevens. Republicans are ready with plenty of fodder from El-Sayed’s past comments; his unrelenting criticism of Israel will be wielded to sway Michigan’s Jewish voters to either back Rogers or sit the race out. 

LOSER: Whitmer

For the longest time, the state’s popular Governor insisted she was not getting involved in the primary. She had defeated El-Sayed to win the nomination in 2018 and has led a diverse state party through some tough family fights, especially when it came to the 2024 presidential race. Whitmer, who is term-limited and will leave office after November’s elections, is often mentioned as a 2028 contender. She has, with varying levels of intensity, said she is not chasing the nomination, but clearly isn’t ready to end her political career. 

So it left a lot of watchers surprised when, on July 24, Whitmer endorsed Stevens. It was a move that another Michigan Democrat and oft-mentioned 2028 contender, Sen. Elissa Slotkin, did not make. Whitmer quickly became one of Stevens’ better surrogates, making the argument in a clearer way than the candidate herself did.

As the folks in Whitmer’s lane look around, they may be questioning if there is a lane for their likes heading into 2028, or if a principled stand for pragmatism is truly a non-starter.