There is a line from the just-finished first season of HBO's remarkable teen drama Euphoria that I think about a lot. It happens in the fourth episode, when Rue, the show's protagonist and recovering drug addict is excitedly telling Ali, the-closest-thing-she-has-to-a-sponsor, about her new bestie Jules. Rue is crushing hard on Jules in the way that teens swoon - hard, deep, and total. Instead of absorbing this information neutrally or showing enthusiasm that Rue has met someone who might be good for her, Ali is dismissive. "Nothing in high school lasts forever," he observes, snuffing out Rue's happiness like a cigarette. It captured neatly so much of what I loved about this daring, but unsubtle look at teen culture in America.
Euphoria saturated itself and the TV screen in all of what makes being a teen such a minefield. It is a time in your life when you have the first taste of independence but little of the experience needed to navigate the big emotions this show marinates in. In its desire to speak big truths, Euphoria left few stones unturned. The standard teen angst of crushes and first loves, of pregnancy scares and parties, is told for the internet age, a generation born after 9/11 that is online all the time, gets hooked on drugs in mom and dad’s medicine cabinet, and vape now-legal marijuana.
Thematically, the internet is like the atmosphere, omnipresent and defining. It informs the characters’ views on sexuality (degrading toward woman), how they interact (intimately, but at a remove), and serves as an escape valve where teens can binge watch reality TV to numb their pain or google the symptoms of bipolar disorder. Euphoria is not the first TV show to serve as a meditation on the dual-edge of our wired world - both connecting and isolating us in ways we do not fully appreciate, but its unflinching view of that phenomenon, where emotions are splayed in their raw form, is jarring.
To be sure, the show broke new ground in a variety of ways, its casual (and extensive) level of full frontal male nudity, cheeky asides (Rue’s “dick pic” PSA), hallucinogenic cinematography, and exploration of teen drug use gave Euphoria a unique look and feel. As I noted in a tweet, an 11th grader runs a side hustle as an online dominatrix for middle aged male pay pigs and it is not even one of the show’s three craziest story lines. But beneath the veneer, if you can get past the ten-year-old drug dealer and the password-protected “slut shame” pages of underage teen girl nude selfies, the adults who are venal and creepy, clueless and neutered, is a love story between Rue and Jules.
And that is where the unevenness of the show sets in. Rue’s story is at its most compelling when she is a charming hustler manipulating her square friend Lexi into giving her clean pee or bailing on a drug debt before it can be collected. Zendaya’s magnetism is never stronger than when she is sizing up her opportunities, deftly side-stepping land mines of her own creation, and consuming the world in a blur of pharmaceutical potions. Her come-to-Jesus moment with Ali puts her on a sober path, but the result is an endgame that reduces her to a single dimension - pouty buzzkill moping while her crush spirals out of control.
As the season reached its end game, it seemed to trim its sails. The smaller plot points are rushed to a conclusion during the school’s winter ball. Nate, the star quarterback (who may also be sexually conflicted, a sadist, and a psychopath), dodges responsibility for brutally assaulting a man who hooked up with his on-again-off-again girlfriend and for (separately) assaulting her. As the couple grinds away on the dance floor, her friends blankly observe that their mutual obsession means they are made for each other. Kat, she of the massive Tumblr fanfic following and burgeoning findom empire, revolts against it in a John Hughes moment, embracing nerdy Ethan as her match.
The ball also frames the characters in a way that made it feel like we were watching a gal pack aging in reverse - one that began with Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda, then to Hannah, Marnie, Jessa, and Shoshanna, and now, Rue, Jules, Maddie, Cassie, Lexi, and Kat. Which is fine so far as it goes, but this level of derivativeness suggested the show was traveling in the wrong direction. When Rue and Jules decide to escape the suburbs for the big city, Rue (predictably) is left on the train platform, unable to jettison the box she lives in. My immediate thought was of the milquetoast 90s movie Mr. Holland’s Opus whose climactic scene is not that different (just with a middle aged man deciding not to leave his wife for the ingenue when they are about to depart for the big city instead of a teen drug addict bailing on her transgendered girlfriend). Zendaya does such an effective job of desexualizing Rue that her romance with Jules has a requisite level of awkwardness when there is unequal attraction; however, Rue’s feelings could have been left unrequited without any harm to the plot line.
It was a disappointing end to an eight-episode run that had some stand out moments and performances. The early part of the final episode featured a haunting voiceover of Rue’s mom reading a letter to herself of what she did not not know when Rue was born that still lingers with me. A young Nate finding out his father cheats on his mother by fucking cross dressers and transsexuals - and recording those encounters - is devastating, and the monologue Ali drops on Rue, about the emotional harm she did to her younger sister, who found Rue OD’d, and how Rue will have to live with that responsibility, is a truth bomb no 17-year-old should have to hear.
Similarly, Maude Apatow’s Lexi shines when given the opportunity (her Bob Ross Halloween outfit and her run as wing woman for Rue’s manic police detective fugue state were standout) but she mainly serves as the can’t-meet-a-boy-overshadowed-by-her-hotter-sister-Cassie. Hunter Schafer’s Jules is astonishing, from the brutally disturbing hook up with Nate’s dad in the premiere to her weekend escape to the city where she meets Anna, Jules dangles emotions like a puppeteer, careening from moments of quiet intimacy to full on rebellion that are exhilarating and difficult to watch.
As the girls muse on the scene unfolding in front of them at that winter ball, they wonder whether this is their last chance to dream or have no ability to do so. I could not think of a better description of being a teenager.
Follow me on Twitter - @scarylawyerguy
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