There was a time when asking someone their guilty pleasure was a classic icebreaker. Honestly, it’s weird anyone ever thought that was work appropriate, but for as long as I’ve been in corporate America, my answer was reality TV.

Then reality TV series became Emmy contenders and reality TV personalities became A-listers, and suddenly my go-to answer didn’t really track anymore.

Now, it’s Ryan Murphy.

Ryan Murphy has had his fair share of unfavorable press and backlash throughout the years, and his shows certainly aren’t for everyone. But as a former Gleek (have I already lost you?) and American Horror Story fanatic, I still get giddy whenever I hear he has something new coming out. Sure, some of his work can come off twisted (yup, Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story) or not entirely historically accurate (hello, Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette), but I’m personally OK with a little truth-bending for the sake of entertainment. Is that so wrong?

Enter The Shards.

I went into The Shards the way I go into most new TV shows these days: almost completely blind. I did my usual refrigerator routine with the streamers: open HBO, stare for a while, find nothing. Open Netflix, stare for a while, find nothing. Open Hulu, and there it was.

I hadn’t read the Bret Easton Ellis book it’s based on, nor did I know much about the premise beyond Ryan Murphy and 1980s Los Angeles. Frankly, that was enough for me to call my fiancé over and hit play.

The Shards follows a group of affluent high school seniors, and I’ll admit, I was wary of the cast at first given that two of its main actors, Kaia Gerber and Homer Gere, are nepo babies. But as the series went on, I was pleasantly surprised. Between the soundtrack, the fashion and the hair, it’s my kind of period piece.

At the center are Bret, Susan, Debbie and Thom, a thick-as-thieves foursome looking to enjoy their final year of high school. Then a new kid, Robert Mallory (played by Gere), shows up just as classmates start going missing. It turns out, a serial killer known as “The Trawler” is on the loose and what I initially thought was going to be a cool ’80s teen drama with just a hint of horror starts to unravel into something much darker and much gorier.

Every episode left me wanting more. The problem is, every episode left me wanting more. Are Robert Mallory and Debbie’s dad, Terry Schaefer, in cahoots? When and how did Thom join a cult? And, of course, WHO is “The Trawler”? The Shards gave us more character development and more storylines each week without giving us many answers.

Now, with a new week and no episode to look forward to, I keep thinking about it: its complicated characters, the kids, but also the parents, its unfinished storylines and, mostly, everything I still don’t know. And I’ve started wondering what exactly it is that I miss so much. Did I really fall in love with these characters? Am I just a sucker for the ’80s? Or did the show spend an entire season withholding just enough information to make me desperate for more?

I’m used to television rewarding me somewhere along the way. A midseason reveal. A mystery solved. A finale that answers the season’s biggest question while teeing up another. The Shards doesn’t really do that. Instead, every week it fed us delicious little crumbs, only for us to reach the end of the season nearly as befuddled as we were at the beginning.

But maybe that’s the point and not the flaw. Maybe I’ve been trained to always be racing toward a big reveal. I’ll happily watch a movie that spends two hours exploring little more than just a character and their evolution and revere it for doing so. Give me a television mystery, on the other hand, and apparently I’m keeping score. I want clues. I want payoff. I want answers.

“Give them nothing. Movies do it all the time!” I imagine the showrunner exclaiming.

And yet, I’m still checking the internet daily to see if it’s been renewed.

Damnit, Ryan Murphy.