Euphoria, HBO’s lurid new melodrama about sex-crazed teens on drugs, is upsetting by design, pornographic and vicious and GAF. (That’s garish as fuck, it’s a thing, ask any 16-year-old.) Not to be paranoid, but I further suspect that the show—created by Sam Levinson (who wrote and directed 2018’s bonkers teen flick Assassination Nation) and starring former Disney Channel sweetheart Zendaya—was designed to upset me, the father of two future teenage boys, personally. Mission accomplished, then. I am upset.
To specify, the most upsetting moment in the Euphoria pilot, from a future-father-of-teens perspective, does not, surprisingly, involve a young trans girl meeting a frightfully adult dating-app hookup with the username “DominantDaddy” in a seedy motel bathed in gorgeous, nauseating teen-noir neon. (The show premieres Sunday night on HBO after Big Little Lies, which is less a “shot + chaser” than a “shot + jump in an active volcano” situation.) It does not involve another sex scene with another young girl that includes unwanted choking and thus compels Zendaya, in nonchalant voice-over, to clarify, “This does not end in a rape.” Nor does it involve the grade-school-lookin’ boy with face tattoos who declares, “This is a fickle industry. Y’all come and go. I’m just trying to stack my cash, pay off our mortgage, so what the fuck you want?” before pulling a stash of designer drugs even Zendaya hasn’t heard of yet out of a convenience-store microwave.
Excuse me for a second. [Climbs out of active volcano; jumps back into volcano.]
No, what really floored me was a far more wholesome interlude in which Zendaya’s character—a troubled, bright, fresh-from-rehab high school junior named Rue—calls on her semi-estranged childhood friend, Lexi, to give her some clean urine so that Rue can beat her worried mother’s drug test. (Lexi is played by Maude Apatow, daughter of Judd Apatow and Leslie Mann; that’s Rue as in “regret,” not Roo as in Winnie the Pooh.) The worst part of this scene, in my opinion, is a quick home-movie clip of Rue and Lexi as 5-year-olds or so, posing cheerfully and oh-so-innocently at a typical child’s birthday party, with the pointy hats and everything. That is a heartwarming visual that I, as the parent of an 8-year-old and a 5-year-old, instantly recognize, dunked whiplash-editing-style into a bottomless cesspool of underage debasement and debauchery that I cannot even begin to comprehend, let alone accept.
What I’m telling you is that this show is the most horrifying thing I’ve seen, in any medium, since Boyhood.
Yes, Boyhood, Richard Linklater’s tender 2014 drama that filmed the same young actor, Ellar Coltrane, in year-by-year vignettes, looking on as the actor and character alike grows from a precocious 6-year-old to a patchy-bearded 18-year-old. I am on the verge of throwing my couch out a window, right this second, while even thinking about Boyhood again. The movie features no DominantDaddies, no choking, none of the stylized obscenity that will undoubtedly make Euphoria fraught thinkpiece fodder for weeks to come. But Linklater cruelly simplifies and dramatizes an objective truth that no parent, no matter how objective, can truly accept: Your adorable 8-year-old will one day be a maddening 18-year-old.
Any coming-of-age tale, no matter how benign, will at least flirt with the bittersweetness of the aging process itself. Blockers, the mildly ribald and quite splendid 2018 Kay Cannon film in which three dopey parents vie to prevent their teenage daughters from making good on a prom-night sex pact, shows brief, heartbreaking clips of those daughters as lovable grade-schoolers too. (“Mildly ribald” is here defined as “a butt-chugging scene and a quick shot of a penis”; Leslie Mann plays one of the moms, by the way.) That sting of future regret—oh, god, they’re getting older—is fleeting but devastating, tiny but overwhelming, the way a paper cut might hurt more than a bear tearing your arms off.
And so it goes with Euphoria, which is definitely trying to tear your arms off at all times. I cannot recommend highly enough this Hollywood Reporter article published Wednesday about the depth of Euphoria’s commitment to Adultest Possible Content. “How Much Teen Sex and Drugs Is Too Much?” the headline asks, and in the course of determining the answer, every single sentence is more spectacularly twisted than the last. Such as: “In one episode alone, close to 30 penises flash onscreen.” Levinson describes a men’s-locker-room scene in the show’s second episode as originally including “like, 80 more” penises; series intimacy coordinator Amanda Blumenthal, meanwhile, apparently “tried to use specially made coverage pads for sex scenes that proved useful on The Deuce, but she found they weren’t that helpful because the actors were rarely in the missionary position.” That’s the line that made me join my couch out the window.
Whether Euphoria works as drama, and can ever rise above nuclear prurience for prurience’s sake, I will leave to those viewers who can stomach more than one episode of teenage boys delivering dialogue like “You want my advice, you fuck her like the whore she is, you kick her ass to the curb.” Zendaya, shunting off her Disney Princess past with a calmer variation on Miley Cyrus’s exhausting zeal, has a wry gravity that’s quite effective in both closeup and voice-over, making her a worthy descendent of, say, Ewan McGregor in Trainspotting or the Gregg Araki multiverse, to drop two hip references nobody Zendaya’s age gives half a shit about. Her rapport with Angus Cloud, playing a syrupy and soulful drug dealer named Fezco, has an unsettling serenity to it, an oasis amid all the atrocity that only hints at a more alluring darkness, in part because Cloud reminds me of Mac Miller.
As HBO’s basically X-rated answer to Netflix’s risible 13 Reasons Why, then, Euphoria at least shows promise that it can toe the cocaine-rail-thin line between bleak and merely empty. You have fun with that, as the teens probably no longer say. For mortified parents, as a preview of coming-of-age attractions, the show’s main lesson is quit watching prestige TV and go play with your kids before they turn into drugged-up, fornicating supervillains.
I’ll put it to you this way. A couple of weeks ago, the 5-year-old drew this:
Furthermore, the 8-year-old clarified that the guy’s arm was actually a giant penis. At the time, I found this absolutely hilarious. Ain’t nobody laughing now. The goal, as always, is to make sure that the boys never get one day older than this.
Disclosure: HBO is an initial investor in The Ringer.
