Ryan Murphy has never been afraid of being tacky. More than that: his unapologetic tackiness is essential to his signature. Everything must be bigger, more sexualized, more colorful, more grotesque, and performed several notches above anything naturalistic direction would allow. In The Shards, however, that excess is beginning to compete with the Bret Easton Ellis novel the series is supposed to be adapting.

“Murder on the Dancefloor,” the fifth episode of the season, is Ryan Murphy in an almost undiluted state. Debbie convinces her friends to take part in Dance Off!, a television dance show where she dreams of being named “Groover of the Week.” The show is fictional, although inspired by programs that actually occupied American television between the late 1970s and the 1980s. Murphy wanted to direct his own dance sequences from that period and built an entire episode around them.

The result is entertaining, extravagant and impossible to abandon. It also raises, once again, the question that follows nearly every one of the producer’s recent projects: what’s the point?

Debbie invests the competition with disproportionate importance. It is not merely about dancing or appearing on television. Winning would mean finally being seen. The problem is that Susan is prettier, more elegant, more popular, and apparently better at everything without ever having to try. Debbie asks her friend, just this once, not to turn her natural ease into another victory. Susan takes to the dance floor anyway and wins by a landslide.

The cruelty of the situation is real. Susan knows how much it means to Debbie and chooses to compete. But the series also insists on infantilizing Debbie, reducing her frustration to yet another outburst from a spoiled, needy rich girl. It is an especially curious choice because, in the novel, the character is not presented as less intelligent than the men around her. In the adaptation, Murphy strengthened Thom, whom Bret frequently describes as limited, while making Debbie more foolish and emotionally unstable.

This treatment is not isolated. Almost every woman in the series is unpleasant, empty, sexually grotesque, competitive, or monstrous. Liz, Debbie’s mother, is a frustrated actress who works in adult films and performs a sex scene with a teenager her daughter’s age. Susan is cold and disloyal. Rhonda is a caricature. Robert’s mother emerges as a monstrous presence from the past. Cha Cha Rodriguez, the reigning Dance Off! champion, is introduced as vulgar and aggressive, involved with the married host and pregnant with his child. Soon afterwards, she is found murdered in the restroom. Cha Cha does not exist in the book. She was created to be sexualized, despised, and turned into a corpse.

The misogyny of The Shards requires some care because the story is narrated by a gay man. That does not mean his misogyny stems from his homosexuality, as though gay men were necessarily incapable of recognizing female subjectivity. What we have is one specific narrator, trapped within his narcissism, his desire, and his need to conceal who he is. Bret organizes women according to the role they play in the story he has created for himself.

Debbie is his heterosexual alibi. Susan is the idealized friend, but also the rival who can have Robert, the man Bret desires, fears and intends to decipher. The Trawler’s victims are female bodies onto which sex, fear and violence can be inscribed. Bret cannot see them fully because he is far too busy watching the men.

In the book, this limitation also tells us something about the narrator. We are trapped inside Bret’s consciousness, inside the way he transforms people into characters and adapts events to fit the stories he wants to tell. The misogyny can therefore be read as part of his inability to recognize the other.

In the series, it is not so simple. Murphy leaves Bret’s point of view and follows the women when he is not present. He could restore the interiority that the narrator denies them. Instead, he frequently confirms Bret’s perception. They are given more scenes, but not necessarily more humanity.

Meanwhile, almost every male relationship is crossed by the possibility of homosexual desire, a hidden experience or an attraction that no one can name. This also comes from the novel. Bret has sex with Matt and Ryan, desires Robert, and is in love with Thom. Terry Schaffer uses the promise of professional help to lure him into a sexual encounter. Robert recognizes Bret’s desire and plays with it.

The issue is not the number of gay or bisexual characters. In the book, we never know how much of this network of desire exists objectively and how much is Bret’s projection. He desires the men around him and therefore interprets every gesture through that possibility. Murphy turns the narrator’s perception into concrete reality. If every man is hiding essentially the same secret, the ambiguity disappears.

Robert remains at the center of this circuit. In this episode, he and Susan nearly kiss in front of the cameras, but she pulls away. Their closeness is enough for Steven to alert Thom and provoke another explosion between the boys. As always in The Shards, the woman appears to be the center of a dispute that, underneath, is far more charged by desire and rivalry between men.

The casting of Homer Gere as Robert and Kaia Gerber as Susan adds a deliciously perverse layer. He is Richard Gere’s son with Carey Lowell; she is Cindy Crawford’s daughter with Rande Gerber. Richard Gere and Cindy Crawford were married from 1991 to 1995. Homer and Kaia are not related in any way and had never even met before the series, but they belong to a kind of alternative family that never existed. In another universe, they might have been siblings.

That is why, when Robert and Susan nearly kiss, the audience experiences a strange impression of imaginary incest. There is nothing objectively incestuous about the scene, but Murphy knows perfectly well which cultural memory he is activating. Even if he has maintained that the cast was chosen for talent, the series and its publicity exploit the association between the two 1990s icons. Gere and Gerber carry a familiarity in their faces that does not belong to them, but to their parents. Murphy adores this kind of provocation: he does not need to say it because he knows we will make the connection.

The same applies to Steven Reinhardt, Terry’s assistant, played by Jordan Roth. Steven moves through the studio handing out bribes, planting rivalries, threatening Ryan and calling the show in a fake French accent. He looks, as someone perfectly described him, like an entity from the Black Lodge transformed into a hairstylist. We still do not know exactly who he is or what he wants. We know only that he appears whenever something needs to become stranger, more artificial or more morally dubious.

Steven is almost a physical manifestation of Murphy’s own method. He enters a scene, manipulates everyone, and watches the chaos with satisfaction.

He is also the one who tells Thom about Susan and Robert. The provocation triggers a fight between the boys and pushes the episode toward another sequence of male bodies, jealousy, violence and poorly disguised desire. Murphy repeatedly films those bodies ambiguously, framing buttocks and torsos before we can identify whether they belong to a man or a woman. It is a way of playing with the viewer’s gaze: who did you think you were desiring?

Used occasionally, it is clever. Repeated constantly, it begins to feel like a mannerism. Every body must be exposed, every sexual encounter must be crude, and every intimacy must contain exploitation, humiliation or threat. The eroticism rarely feels intimate. It is a performance for the camera, just like the Dance Off! routines.

At the end, Debbie finds Cha Cha murdered in the restroom, killed with a weapon similar to the one previously carried by a member of the Riders of the Afterlife. The death increases suspicion around Thom and the cult, but also gives Bret an important alibi. If the murder happened during the taping, in front of everyone, he cannot be the only Trawler.

That does not eliminate the possibility of Bret’s involvement in some of the violence. In the book, Robert is not the Trawler, although he may have some connection to the killer. After Robert’s death, the Trawler kills again and claims the murders were offerings to Robert, whom he calls “The God.” At the same time, everything indicates that Bret was the person who attacked Susan and Thom: Susan bites the masked assailant and later sees the mark on Bret’s arm.

Bret does not need to have a dissociative personality and be secretly responsible for every murder. A real Trawler may exist while Bret uses the serial killer as cover for his own actions. The novel’s central question is not simply who killed, but how much of the story the narrator invented so that he could live with himself.

It is this complexity that is beginning to disappear beneath Murphy’s spectacle. The recreation of 1981 is excellent, from the cars and costumes to the cold interiors and the absence of responsible adults. The soundtrack still works as a powerful shortcut to the period. But not even the music can preserve its impact when everything around it is already screaming.

Every entrance is a diva entrance. Every revelation demands an outburst. Every eccentric character must become grotesque. Every sex scene must seem scandalous. And every episode must surpass the one before it, even if the adaptation has to stop so that Ryan Murphy can fulfill his dream of directing his own murderous version of Dance Fever.

He remains an extraordinary maker of hits. Few producers understand image, casting, provocation and the audience’s desire to keep watching quite so well. The Shards is addictive precisely because Murphy is unashamed of exaggeration. The discomfort, in that sense, does not necessarily represent a failure. He hits a nerve all the time.

The question is whether that discomfort reveals something about Bret, the closet, misogyny and the violence of that world, or merely confirms that we are watching another profoundly personal Ryan Murphy project. The series may yet recover the ambiguity of the book. For now, however, the killer remains hidden — and Bret Easton Ellis’ story is also beginning to disappear somewhere behind the mirror ball.