“I feel like the shows that really breakthrough on television, what they are doing is capturing a moment that is happening in the real world but our culture hasn’t caught up with it yet.”- Cynthia Nixon
Actress Cynthia Nixon (best known for playing Miranda Hobbs) was recently on a Vogue podcast laying out the secret sauce of how Sex and the City went from a little pilot TV show to a cultural phenomenon. While her comment is about Sex and the City, it could easily refer to Euphoria- the dark teen drama that I binge-watched, two seasons, two days; no sleep.
For anyone who hasn’t seen it (lol) Euphoria follows 17-year-old teenager Rue Bennett (played and narrated by Zendaya) as she battles drug addiction and life with her friends at East Highland high school. This Generation Z group of friends navigate everything from love and loss to slut shaming, gender fluidity, iPhone selfies and their reckless parents.
The finale of Season 2, the most recent drop, just aired in the US and dominated Twitter timelines - as viewers dissected every story line. Even Zendaya jumped on Instagram with a trigger warning, telling fans to only watch the season if they felt comfortable. Of the 13 million viewers who did watch, the show excited and enraged both super-fans and those who claimed it glamourised drug addiction. It generated so much online buzz that it was just renewed for a third season.
Euphoria is dark on purpose. Yes, it has the common themes of wanting to leave small suburban towns, as well as exploring first loves and the endless popularity contest that is high school. But this is the era of OnlyFans and illicit images airdropped to your phone without your consent because you accidentally left your Bluetooth on. The show covers everything from short attention spans to gaslighting- it also has way more nude scenes than feel necessary. But in its accurate portrayal of real life, the characters go between shopping malls and house parties, use digital currency and cash, and juggle babysitting jobs with selling images of their feet online to creeps. This is 2022, where outside of the show we’re seeing the impact of SECTION 230 play out in real time and central banks are wondering whether to create digital versions of regulated money because unregulated digital payment systems got so big in the market (thanks to private equity and blockchain) that legislation was left to play catch up. And us, the consumers, are looking at the mobile money apps on our phones wondering whether it’s better that the government knows we bought overpriced tampons yesterday thanks to 30-year inflation high, or whether we give our spending data to the tech titans instead. And that’s before we even get on to the youth mental health crisis, with rising rates of severe anxiety.
No wonder that Euphoria doesn’t have the optimism of the 90s, where Clarissa Explained It All in United Colours of Benetton brightly coloured t-shirts and OshKosh style dungarees. Clarissa lived in a different time, she got her education from the same saccharine school system that taught OG Saved by The Bell teens. Back then wholesome kids went to the diner after school to eat burgers, they didn’t put on their mom’s clothes to go pick up suitcases filled with $10k worth of prescription drugs. It was peak 90s globalisation, the Berlin Wall had just come down causing international trade to flourish, credit card use bolstered the economy and MSN Messenger offered up an online space for teen friendships to flourish. One-off pregnancy episodes of teen TV shows felt ground-breaking, and we didn’t even have the language to articulate depression and anxiety properly.
By the 2000s, shows like The O.C. reflected our ever-changing world. Characters like Ryan Atwood took over the screen, the troubled kid whose dad and brother had been arrested, and whose mom battled alcoholism. And in the UK, hit teen show Skins documented sex, cheating and eating disorders as told through the lens of a bunch of school kids living in Bristol. The soundtrack to their lives was the soft beep of their old Nokia phones- not tech designed to keep them distracted.
Euphoria took that baton and ran with it. The pilot episode blasted on to our screens with a reminder that these Gen-Zers were screwed from birth thanks to the trauma etched into the double helix of their DNA. How could a reflection of their lives after that be anything but bleak? Each hour-long episode that followed the pilot, delivered up one triggering storyline after the next. And each one felt like a reminder of how the choices we made two decades ago still affect this generation. Everything from our economic policies to legislation around race, gender and access, the internet, and our overall mental and physical health.
At the end of Season 1, Rue sits with her sponsor Ali. They spend the episode debating the pros and cons of getting sober and what it means to exist right now. They don’t shy away from the fact that Rue’s generation are the main beneficiaries of an Internet predicated on surveillance capitalism, and a society where anger is more popular than empathy or redemption. Rue tells Ali: “The world’s just really f*cking ugly, you know. It’s really f*cking ugly and everyone seems to be ok with it…. I don’t want to be a part of it, I don’t even want to witness it.”
By the end of Season 2, we’re at Lexi’s school play, where Rue’s former best friend is using her stage production to put all of her friends on blast. She drags their questionable life choices in front of the rest of the school- airing dirty laundry in the Instagram age. The play holds up a mirror to everyone’s toxic relationships, causes fist fights in the girl’s bathroom and even ends with an arrest. But mostly it helps the friends gain perspective on their lives and their emotions. For Rue, it puts the death of her father and her deep depression front and centre so she can start to work through the sadness and concentrate on staying sober (at least until the start of Season 3).
Mostly, watching Euphoria feels like how it used to feel reading Vice Magazine (the print edition), a very real, very intense screenshot of our times, offered up with some explanation of how bleak things are. Maybe that’s why Euphoria is the only show everyone’s talking about right now. It’s a time-stamped reflection of everything from economic policy to short-termism in politics and health played out on screen. There’s a whole generation on the ‘cusp of adulthood’, navigating their way through a world we helped to co-create two decades ago. Unpacking how we got to this very messy and unstable place is important. How do we change the things that are within our control? And how does the system that’s built around us change for the better too? What tools and policies do we need to take better care of our collective selves? And how do we make more empathetic, just choices moving forward?