Review: From 80s L.A. rich kids to a Canadian mystery, coming-of-age sagas offer different strokes

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Set us as preferred If we are lucky enough to survive into our 20s, and have attained some degree of adult consciousness, we all will have lived a coming-of-age story.It’s a powerful, relatable basis for fiction or memoir or some combination of the two.

Poignant.Piquant.

It might be hilarious or depressing or, probably, both at once.Stories of first times, of big feelings imperfectly grasped, of life coming into focus for better or worse.

Engaging with them as a reader or viewer, we look back on who we were, who we wanted to be, who we wish we hadn’t been.I get a little misty remembering my own clumsy progress through that flower-filled minefield.

Remind me never to tell you about it sometime.Television likes a coming-of-age story, and has logged some great ones — “My So-Called Life,” “Never Have I Ever,” “Freaks and Geeks,” “Everybody Hates Chris” — along with … some other ones.Premiering Wednesday are two series focusing on characters in their late teens; while stylistically, and one would say morally, miles apart, they nevertheless cover some of the same ground.

There are things you can’t avoid growing up, wherever your life is set.A rich-kids drama with a side of serial murder set in 1981 Los Angeles, FX‘s “The Shards” plants itself at the intersection of Bret Easton Ellis, whose 2023 “autofictional” novel it’s based on, and co-creator Ryan Murphy, in one of his bloodier moods, amplifying each other’s taste for the sensational and surfaces.Set on a lake in Canada, Prime Video’s “Sterling Point,” from Megan Park (“My Old Ass”), unrolls like a leisurely indie film; there will not be blood.Igby Rigney plays Ellis in “The Shards,” narrating from the future.

Bret shares with his authorial namesake an avocation and a love for Joan Didion (“Like all aspiring writers ...