Look at all those pills! For such a young girl! The point is less to say something, and more to shock the viewer. (We don’t find out what they are.) It feels vaguely relevant, in that Rue later develops a drug addiction, but it also feels like a magazine cover story about kids being overmedicated come to life. In one sequence, Rue, as a little girl, goes from counting the panels in an overhead light in her home to sitting in a doctor’s office (where it’s stated that she might have a host of “possible” mental health conditions) to watching her mother divvy up pills that she will need to take, day after day, to manage the conditions she’s been officially diagnosed with. Rue doesn’t feel like a person so much as a collection of storytelling tics in her voiceover narration. Instead, it seems designed to provoke her presumed adult audience. The opening montage tracing the life of Rue ( Zendaya) to date almost put me off of Euphoria entirely because it’s so arch and blunt - but not in a way that seems to serve the voice of the character. Show #1: the same old “Why are the teens so messed up?” panic, directed at parents of kids who are almost teens Rue is struggling after she gets back from rehab.
#EUPHORIA JULES AND RUE SERIES#
It’s a series at war with itself - two shows in one. Yet every so often, the show will present a scene or image so beautiful that I can’t write it off entirely. And very little of the show actually seems as if it’s tapped into the way kids live in 2019. Their wildly racing emotions and thoughts make them ideal protagonists for stories, because they will often embark on completely destructive courses of action with the certitude that they are doing exactly what they need to be doing.īut too much of the Euphoria pilot feels like leftover “What the kids are getting up to today - it might shock you! More at 11!” paranoia from the ’90s, reheated for today’s viewers. Teens are always caught between a growing emotional and physical maturity and the fact that their brains are racing to catch up. The episode has gotten a lot of attention for depicting “how the teens live today,” but its greatest strength isn’t what’s timely about it but what’s eternal about it. I almost had to stop watching it after the first five minutes, which summarize the protagonist’s life up until now she’s 17 years old, but Euphoria begins with the assertion that the last time she was happy was in the womb, a sentiment that feels like it must have been ripped off from a Hot Topic T-shirt. The show’s pilot swerves wildly between careful observation and trying too hard. No, the true audience for Euphoria is parents of kids who are about 5 to 10 years old, who still have relatively good relationships with those kids but can see the storm clouds on the horizon. The true audience of HBO’s new teen drama Euphoria isn’t really teens. The episode of the week for June 16 through 22 is the pilot of HBO’s Euphoria. Every week, we pick a new episode of the week.
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