It’s difficult to talk about Euphoria without noting its inherently alarmist nature. Yes, it provides a stark window into the lives of a group of teens, each flawed and messed up in one or several ways, making their lives even more messier as they make a variety of mistakes. However, it’s not speaking to Gen Z teens, as much as it is speaking to parents.
These aren’t the parents of current teens, but rather the parents of pre-pubescent children who will soon turn into teens in a few years time. It assumes that parents are hoping that their children will have more sanitized high school experiences, and stay away from the problematic spirals of drugs, sex and violence. You are wrong, the show grimly declares to these parents. Your children’s lives will be just as screwed up as yours were, if not even more so.
Euphoria follows Rue (Zendaya), a girl born only days before 9/11 and diagnosed with mental disorders that include OCD (and may or may not include bipolar disorder). As a way to cope, she has fallen on drugs to make sense of her own problems and the world. The show starts with Rue coming back fresh from rehab, following an overdose that deeply scarred her mother and sister Gia. Instead of trying to keep on her new path, however, Rue soon falls back to her own habits, buying drugs on credit from a dealer named Fezco and his younger partner.
Through Rue, we also come to learn about other teenagers in her social orbit: best friend Jules (Hunter Schafer), hateful jock Nate (Jacob Elordi), concerned friend Lexi (Maude Apatow) and insecure Kat (Barbie Ferreira). There’s also McKay (Algee Smith), who’s dating beautiful Cassie Howard (Sydney Sweeney), a sweet girl who has unfortunately gained a reputation as the school slut.
There’s a lot going on with each of these characters.
Jules, for instance, is a trans woman who often meets older men for casual sex. At one point, it’s suggested that this behavior may stem from an unpleasant divorce between her parents, where, surprisingly, her father ended up getting custody instead of her mother. That’s to be expected though, considering her mother locked her up in a psych ward once as a response to Jules questioning her sexuality. Jules is caring, but to a fault; she has a manic pixie dream girl aura to her that soon attracts Rue herself.
Jules, however, is lackadaisical with Rue: although she hooks up with her after a bad experience with a date, she often parties with other people. At one point, she hooks up with one of these girls, named Ana, and gleefully tells Rue that she loves Ana. Rue blithely accepts it, but you can tell that it’s breaking her hard underneath the facade.
Each of these characters are broken, though not beyond repair. Nate deals with a lot of toxic masculinity issues, which ties in with his dad, Cal Jacobs (Eric Dane), who has a penchant for sexual encounters with underaged teens. Kat starts out writing a lot of smutty fanfiction before graduating to cam-girling. Cassie is a sweet girl, and even though McKay does love her, she’s often viewed by him (and by lots of other ex-boyfriends) as a piece of meat to be claimed as a prize possession. At one point, when she refuses to hook up with a boy who she had danced with at a party, the boy ruefully asks her if she thought that he was there because of her personality. Maddy (Alexa Demie) is devoted to her boyfriend, Nate, despite constant fighting; what’s alarming, however, is her tendency to put up with his abusive behaviors.
Amidst these storms, the characters try to find safe haven within their significant others. It’s the kind of raw, confusing, consuming love that you expect to see from teens.
Rue gives up drugs once she and Jules start going out together, but an older man from her NA meetings warns her that nothing built in high school is supposed to last. Cassie finds out she’s pregnant, and when she goes to McKay, a part of her expects him to love her enough to commit to raising the child, but when he proves otherwise, she can’t help but be crestfallen. At the operating theater, as she goes through the abortion procedure, Cassie dreams that she’s figure-skating: a hobby that she picked up at the insistence of her deadbeat dad.
The best part about Euphoria is definitely Zendaya’s performance as Rue, which anchors the show. She’s cynical, true, but she’s also deeply vulnerable. She barely dresses up, often wearing a hoodie pulled over her head. At her core, she’s just a person who wants to be loved, and she latches onto Jules for that affection. At times, when she and Jules are just being silly with each other over sleepovers, you get the feeling that Rue has found a refuge amidst the storms in her life. But that proves untrue by the end of the season.
Looking back at the first season, there seems little point to all of these stories, from a narrative perspective. This is not a show about damaged characters bettering themselves and embarking on the path to recovery (at least, not yet). But these characters are compelling to a fault: even Nate strikes a chord when he lashes out uncontrollably once his father tries to restrain him. There’s a lot of potent drama to be mined from these characters’ lives, and the showrunner, Sam Levinson, is acutely aware of this.
There will be a second season, which is good, because there are so many narrative threads that need to be explored. There are some characters, like Lexi, who we don’t get to see a lot of in the first season; hopefully they will be better explored in the future.