Who Pushed Terry? EPs Talk Finale Mystery and Season 2 (Exclusive)

“One of the most intimate ways to kill someone is to push them from a great height,” intones Los Angeles teen Bret (Igby Rigney) at the outset of The Shards season finale. And one of the most impactful ways to keep our attention is to end on a cliffhanger, which is exactly what FX’s ’80s-set drama did with Episode 9’s “Stairway to Heaven.” (Warning: The Shards Season 1 finale spoilers ahead!) 

Opening with the slo-mo image of skeevy producer Terry Schaffer (Wes Bentley) falling from the second-floor banister to the foyer of his Hollywood Hills mansion during a Halloween party, this pivotal turn in the glamorously dread-soaked adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis‘ novel gave us severe “Who Shot J.R.?” vibes. Oh, and a gnawing need for the network to renew the Ryan Murphy project for a second season. Because Terry’s gnarly fall isn’t the only mystery left unsolved.

Since the start of their senior year, aspiring author Bret (Igby Rigney) and his high-school besties — girlfriend Debbie (Hayes Warner) as well as golden couple Susan (Kaia Gerber) and Thom (Graham Campbell) — have been dealing with one nightmare after another. A crazed cultist crashed one of their soirees. Debbie’s horse was decapitated. Her mom, Liz (Evan Rachel Wood), has a secret porn film that was just leaked. Enigmatic new classmate Robert Mallory (Homer Gere) is trying to steal Susan from Thom. And Bret is convinced the guy is also a serial killer known as The Trawler, who began killing teens at the same time Robert came to town. They may have also slept together last week, but we’ll get to that in a second. To top it all off, they’ve now got Terry all splayed out in the foyer, and every one of them is a suspect.

Chris Haston / FX

“We knew that we were all headed towards the moment that is from the book, which is Terry falling from the staircase and the mystery around who pushed him,” explains Brad Simpson, one of the executive producers of the show along with Murphy, Easton Ellis and Nina Jacobson. “We had an original draft of the script that ended more on just sort of the cliffhanger there at the house. It was actually Nina who had a note to Ryan that was like, ‘I feel like we need to have a beat that pulls us a little bit more together and answers some questions, but then opens up other questions for the next season.’”

He continues, “And so Ryan came up with the ending at the police station where first Bret and Robert are called in, and they’re there to sort of inform on each other, wanting to hold the other accountable. And then suddenly everybody’s there, all the suspects.”

Simpson says that the scene, which gathers Bret, Thom, Debbie, Susan, Liz, her secret porn partner Ryan (Daniel Dale), and Terry’s ambitious fixer Steven (Jordan Roth) into one interrogation room, is their way of “reminding us at the end of the season that there’s been multiple murders and multiple pushes, and it could be one person doing all of it or one person doing none of it or multiple people who have multiple motives doing different things.”

And from the sound of it, some of those things may never be resolved. “In the book, as you know, you never really know [who The Trawler is],” Simpson points out. And Jacobson adds that the hookup between Bret and Robert in Episode 8, which had us going “hmmm” after Bret awoke in an empty bed and Robert acting as if nothing happened, serves as a “nod towards the unreliability of Bret as a narrator because that’s such an important part of the book. And for me, the penultimate episode is where I think you really start to wonder.”

FX

“It’s like, does Bret even sleep with Robert?” posits Simpson. “When he wakes up the next morning, he seems to not be there. That’s the question.” The two are equally coy when it comes to whether it was The Trawler who attacked Susan in the finale or Thom posing as him to scare her back into his arms, and whether we’ll see any flashbacks of Bret with his now-murdered secret beau, Matt Kellner (Owen Painter).

“I mean, people love Owen Painter and his performance, but we haven’t gotten to that in the [writers’] room yet for the next season, which we’re working on right now,” teases Simpson. “We’ll see.”

We may also see a fateful segment from the book that blows the lid off of a certain storyline in Palm Springs. “We wrote an episode, and we just couldn’t fit it in,” Simpson admits. “We had a standalone episode written for Palm Springs, but we just couldn’t fit it into our order for the season. And so it is sitting there waiting to explore.”

In the meantime, while we’re sitting here waiting for the show to be officially renewed, the producers are already plotting out where The Shards might pick up. Whereas Easton Ellis’ book takes place over about two months, Simpson confirms that “we’re slowing it down [and] trying to reflect that feeling of high school where days feel like weeks, weeks feel like months, months feel like years, and you’re thin-sliced in terms of your experience of every moment.”

Simpson notes that “we need to expand the last part of the book and then try to get to that and then see. The book really ends in November, and there’s a whole school year left [after that], so we have plenty of runway to go if we want to keep at the pace of the show…depending on just the audience’s appetite.”

The Shards, Now Streaming, FX and Hulu