Animal Spirits Unleashed on the Small Screen

Anthony Fauci’s testimony on Capitol Hill last week — or the lack of it — brought back unpleasant memories of COVID’s bad old days. But sheltering-in-place was made slightly more tolerable thanks to the hijinks of Joe Exotic, Carol Baskin, and their kooky zoo pals in COVID’s first breakout TV hit, Netflix’s “Tiger King.”It’s easy to sniff at such a freak-show spectacle, as well as director Eric Goode’s 2024 follow-up “Chimp Crazy.” Yet both are stuffed with characters, settings and scenarios that easily could have been lifted from Mark Twain, William Faulkner, or Flannery O’Connor.Now we have Mr. Goode’s latest, a deep dive into the global black market for smuggled reptiles, premiering this week on HBO. A stunning, at times hilarious, expose of crime, compulsion, and borderless capitalism, “Monsters of God” features good old boys from the swamps of Florida alongside Bay of Pigs Invasion veterans, and secretive Germans named Wolfgang. In other words, now we’re in Joseph Conrad and Don DeLillo territory.Over on FX, a very different — it would seem — scripted series called “The Shards” also debuts this week. Based on a 2023 Bret Easton Ellis novel “The Shards” is set in early-1980s Los Angeles, amongst insanely wealthy high school kids. If that’s not bad enough, several of these teen characters are played by the nepo-est of nepo babies (Cindy Crawford’s daughter, Richard Gere’s son), even though they’re in their mid-20s.In short, 40 years after “Less Than Zero,” it seems as if Bret Easton Ellis, the author of “American Psycho” and “Imperial Bedrooms,” hasn’t progressed all that far. And yet, for a few episodes at least, “The Shards” is almost as alluring as the novel upon which it’s based. Mr Ellis’s novel follows these angsty students as they drink, smoke, snort, and gripe about the homecoming dance, their clueless parents, and, occasionally, a serial killer known as “The Trawler,” who targets rich kids just like them.This definitely should not work, as a book or anything else. Yet the enigmatic first-person narrator of “The Shards,” of course named “Bret,” and of course working on a novel called “Less Than Zero,” is an impressive blend of ironic and hypnotic, earnest and absurd. Plus the early-1980s soundtrack of “The Shards” — onscreen, as it was on the page – is priceless.And, like “Monsters of God,” “The Shards” is about America’s baser instincts — wanting the things we can’t have, the predators who swoop in when rules get in the way, and the violence that too often ensues. But “Monsters of God” has the good sense to wrap things up in five episodes, whereas “The Shards” goes on for nearly twice as long. Early on, Ellis seems to have convinced collaborator Ryan Murphy, hardly known for restraint, to keep things relatively calm and cool. With Truman Capote and Joan Didion namedrops, conveyed in Irby Rigney’s velvety voice-over, “The Shards” has potential to be more than some “Euphoria”-“Friday the 13th” mash-up.Bret even starts off taunting the target audience of “The Shards.” “Kids today have it fucking easy,” he declares. But the reality is that anyone born in the 21st Century knows all about being preyed upon — by online bullies, algorithm “trawlers,” student-loan officers, and prescription drug peddlers.Unfortunately, by the time we encounter a “Boogie Nights”-ish sub-plot, and a gruesome TV-dance-show murder, “The Shards,” is well on its way to being, well, just another American horror story.“Monsters of God,” by contrast, builds its jaw-dropping momentum slowly, opening with just two dueling reptile dealers based in Philly and Florida. This alone is plenty fascinating, and results in multiple arrests after an awful 1977 discovery in south Jersey’s vast Pine Barrens forest.But this is only the beginning, for there are millions to be made in smuggling exotic creatures, and then drugs, of course. So we then meet betrayed wives and co-workers, and discover a vast underground network stretching from a pet shop at Manhattan’s Third Avenue, to Madagascar and Malaysia.‘Monsters of God.’ HBO/ Goode FilmsFor all of their surreal absurdities, all three of Mr. Goode’s investigations are really about people who just can’t stop doing crazy, illegal things, partly because the likes of Britney Spears, Sigfried & Roy, and millions of regular folks refuse to be told what beautiful creatures they can and can’t keep locked up in tanks and cages.The smugglers we meet in “Monsters of God” are bonkers, but also brilliant in their way. Many of them, it should be noted, are not in prison, at least not anymore.Is this trashy, manipulative, and exploitative? Perhaps. But then so is “Goodfellas” and Fargo. And like those masterpieces, “Monsters of God” is also, at times, cinematically dreamy, moving and beautiful.There is a suspenseful moment in episode three of “The Shards” when Bret is descending into a creepy basement. Without spoiling too much, let’s just say this could get very bloody very quickly.As Stevie Nicks belts out “Edge of Seventeen,” several big reveals follow. Among them? A sluggish iguana, trapped in a cage. How it got there turns out to be far more fascinating than just another serial killer hunting pretty rich kids.

Animal Spirits Unleashed on the Small Screen

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