The Watchlist
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What new film and TV picks are introduced at the start of The Watchlist?
Time now for The Watch List, our film and TV recommendations for the week ahead. And I'm joined today by business post film critic John McGuire and culture journalist Zara Hederman. Good afternoon, guys. John, Ryan Murphy, the king of kind of semi-borderline trashy TV and novelist Brett Easton Ellis were kind of made for each other, really. So tell me about The Shards on Disney+.
This is The Shards, Disney Plus, Brendan. Now, like you say, the writer Brad Easton Ellis has enlisted the much lauded showrunner Ryan Murphy, who counts Nip Tuck, American Horror Story. Zara and myself were talking about OJ, An American Story. Yeah, love story, massive hit in the last year. Huge hit TV producer. And this is a sex-drenched, blood-soaked, drug-addled adaptation of his 2023 novel The Shards, which came out of a podcast for... And it's an auto fiction in that it folds Ellis's own biography, his own teenage experiences as a kind of a hedonistic 1980s L.A. high school kid into a more lurid story of serial murder amongst the students at a school. And Easton Ellis is played himself by a young actor called Igby Rigney.
And he's a 17-year-old bisexual rich kid with absent parents. He's got a Mercedes Benz and a housekeeper and a desire to become a writer. And he's actually working on Easton Ellis' produced, narrates it. He's working on the book that would become Less Than Zero, Ellis' debut, which I think he was only 18 or 19 when it was released. And he's at the centre of this tightly bonded relationship group about to enter their last year of high school. He's got a girlfriend played by Hayes Warner. He's got a best friend who's the school captain played by Kaya Gerber, played by Cindy Crawford. And then the other new kid arrives and he's played by Richard Gere's son Homer. And Then a serial killer called the Trawler starts murdering pupils and starts taunting this friend group.
Is it this writerly imagination that Easton Ellis is trying to develop or is there something really sinister at play? And that's what you've got, this shiny kind of Beverly Hills 90210 aesthetic in that glazed, beautiful LA golden sunshine aesthetic and this more corrupt and disgusting horror story.
I think if you like Ryan Murphy or you like Bret Easton Ellis. It's the collision of both really is very interesting.
But it is that kind of itchy air of paranoia.
How does the Disney+ series *The Shards* blend Bret Easton Ellis’s novel with Ryan Murphy’s style?
Something is beautiful in this beautiful place. Something really rotten is happening.
It's the kind of thing Richard Gere would have been in back in the 80s. Yeah, it's not far off that. So that's The Shards on Disney+. And I'm told actually it's available with audio description too. But Jesus, how much description do you want? That's not a pleasant thing. Zara, Mourinho on Netflix from Tuesday is a three-parter about football manager Jose Mourinho. Is it a vanity project or is it good?
So I actually, I haven't seen it. I've just seen the trailer and the trailer alone got me excited. I love Mourinho. One of my favourite catchphrases of his that I've adopted a lot in my life. If I speak, I'm in trouble. But yeah, and as Mourinho says in the ad for this, if they made, you wouldn't do a documentary with a guy who won nothing. Obviously, he's like one of the most trophied managers across so many different leagues across the world.
And he knows that.
And he knows it. And he did say as well once that if they made a film about him, it should be George Clooney playing him. So it was filmed during his kind of period of like moving from Benfica to Real Madrid. And from it, like obviously we get all the kind of players that he would have worked with, Eden Hazard, Drogba, Ibrahimovic. They're talking about just how determined and like how passionate he was as a manager and that you would not... not give him 100%. But then we do see in it from the trailer that he gets emotional because I think he did have quite a fractious and tough time with his family life while he was manager a couple of years ago.
Look, he is a fascination anyway.
Oh, I will be sitting in front having all three episodes at once, yeah.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What new film and TV picks are introduced at the start of The Watchlist?
0:00–2:30
2
How does the Disney+ series *The Shards* blend Bret Easton Ellis’s novel with Ryan Murphy’s style?
2:30–5:06
3
Is the Netflix three‑part documentary *Mourinho* a vanity project or a must‑watch for football fans?
5:06–8:34
4
Which classic plays are being adapted for TV on BBC 4 over the next four months?
8:34–9:51
5
What does Colin Murphy’s documentary *A Day in May* reveal about Ireland’s marriage‑equality referendum?
9:51–11:16
6
Why is the new Irish film *Lady* being compared to *Grey Gardens* and why should you see it in cinemas?
11:16–12:19
7
What ethical questions does the sci‑fi thriller *Soulmate* raise about sex‑robot relationships?
12:19–12:53
8
How does the upcoming biopic *Tony* portray a young Anthony Bourdain’s rise to fame?
12:53–13:01