New Delhi, Aug. 5 -- generating genuine conversation about a director's creative ambitions rather than just his output.

Ryan Murphy's adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's semi-autobiographical 2023 novel has been one of the more closely watched FX launches in recent years, not because of network marketing but because of what the source material demands. Ellis wrote The Shards as the first explicitly autobiographical work of his career, a return to the 1981 Los Angeles adolescence that preceded the New York decade when he assembled Patrick Bateman from those same raw materials. The novel began as a serialized audiobook through Ellis's podcast in 2020 and 2021 before print publication. Critics who received advance screeners described the prem...