Euphoria, the slick, specific, high-budget teen drama midway via its second season on HBO, has from the beginning been a cleaning soap layered in heady seriousness. The present, tailored by Sam Levinson from an Israeli collection of the identical identify and co-produced by Drake, took on a close to encyclopedia of Right now’s Teen Points – intercourse shaming, drug dependancy, physique insecurity, net personas, revenge porn, being pregnant and abortion, emotional abuse, poisonous masculinity, self-harm and melancholy, and extra – with a bracing, revelatory frankness and thick lacquer of gloss (and full-frontal nudity).
By its first season finale in 2019, through which most important character Rue (Zendaya, who gained an Emmy for the function) practically dies in a graphic drug overdose, Euphoria had drawn a legion of followers (the finale drew 1.2 million night-of viewers and have become HBO’s second-most tweeted-about collection ever, behind Recreation of Thrones) and managed to steadiness shock with sensitivity. It established beloved characters – specifically the delicate, alchemical bond between Rue and Jules (Hunter Schafer), a trans character – in addition to a particular visible palette: saturated coloration, shimmery beats, high-voltage fantasy, meta narration, a zeitgeist-aiming present with a small trace of irony and a big dollop of extra.
The long-anticipated second season, which premiered in January and opened with a brash, 10-minute, Scorsese-style sequence on drug vendor Fezco’s (Angus Cloud) gun-toting prison grandmother (performed by The Sopranos’ Kathrine Narducci), has leaned much more to that extra, to a divisive diploma. The scores are up – 10.3 million folks have watched the season premiere, and this week’s episode was up 41% from the week earlier than – however reception is blended. On-line reactions toggle chaotically between honest enjoyment and hate-watching or, for a lot of, one thing inarticulably in between. The chasm between actual highschool (boring) and Euphoria highschool (more and more unhinged) has develop into distractingly huge, a joke changed into its personal TikTok meme on its peacocking style. Whereas the primary season felt like submerging, excessive, in a heat tub of high-school reminiscences shot via with glitter, dialed as much as 11, and distorted in a funhouse mirror, the second season – self-indulgent, luridly violent, nonetheless lush, expensively soundtracked – has taken on the sensation of a chore. Euphoria feels caught – a disturbing, self-conscious drag.
Take, as an illustration, considered one of its signature fantasy sequences early on this season’s third episode, through which Rue delivers a monologue on her character’s wearying relapse with drug dependancy, a downward spiral that has examined followers’ morale and offered one half of the season’s unfastened amalgamation of plot. “As a beloved character that lots of people are rooting for, I really feel a sure accountability to make good choices,” she says to the digicam, pointer in hand, miming a schoolteacher instructing on the ABCs of hiding a relapse from family and friends. “Now, in all equity, I did say from the start that I had no intention of staying clear. However I get it. Our nation’s darkish and fucked up and other people simply wish to discover hope. Someplace. Wherever. If not in actuality, then in tv.
“Sadly,” she provides, with out apology, “I’m not it.” It’s an interesting meta second – Levinson explaining, through Rue, why he’s testing the boundaries of her likability; the present itself acknowledging that it’s probably not profitable escapism, nor attempting to be. It additionally looks like an admission of viewers’ fatigue with Rue’s dependancy, which has drawn the season into close to gang film territory. Euphoria, like its floundering most important character, has shirked the teenager plot.
This isn't to complain that Euphoria is ridiculous, as a result of ridiculousness is a component and parcel of the teenager cleaning soap style, of which this present, regardless of its HBO pedigree, is part. It’s most likely greatest summarized, as the author Molly Lambert put it, as “simply A24 Degrassi”. (A24, the impartial leisure firm behind such stylized, visually saturated options as Spring Breakers, Moonlight, Midsommar and Uncut Gems, additionally produces Euphoria.) It shares many tried and true staples of reveals like Dawson’s Creek, One Tree Hill, The OC, Gossip Lady, Degrassi, Skins, Australian staples like Dwelling and Away and Neighbours, together with: an outsider who remains to be strikingly lovely (in Euphoria, the second season character of Lexi, performed by Maude Apatow); a love triangle involving a blonde and a brunette (Cassie, Maddy and Nate – the second season’s different contorted plot); at the least one misplaced father or mother; uncontrolled home events, clearly.
All of those beloved teen reveals had been powered by constant, cyclical melodrama and sustained by an implicit suspension of disbelief (that older actors in any respect resembled pimply teenagers, that teenagers had been both having no intercourse in any respect or extremely good intercourse, and so forth.) Ridiculousness might be extraordinarily entertaining, as in any of the aforementioned reveals and even in unintentionally chaotic collection similar to Apple TV’s The Morning Present. However when not harnessed to character growth, plot momentum, or narrative pay-off, it feels self-indulgent, grating, even flat.
Teen present violence isn’t distinctive to Euphoria – suppose a college taking pictures plot on Degrassi, that and extra on One Tree Hill, even an ill-conceived murder-as-self-defense-from-rape plot-line on Friday Evening Lights. However whereas these reveals included genuinely farfetched (and traumatic!) occasions for the sake of plot, suspense and drama, Euphoria more and more seems to take action for the sake of aesthetics. The present has all the time toed the road between type and substance, and this season crossed into the previous. An addict facet character taking pictures up outdoors an LA suburbs motel, Rue strip-searched by a menacing vendor in a bathe, Fezco pummeling Nate’s (Jacob Elordi) face, the digicam lingering on the blood and crunch of his nostril – all of it feels, in Euphoria’s lurid, hyper-real type, queasy and an excessive amount of, explicitness spoilt to exploitation. The present is, by style definition, ridiculous, however not in on the joke of its personal extra.
There are elements of Euphoria that felt genuinely refreshing – a nuanced portrayal of 1 teenage woman’s (Kat, performed by Barbie Ferreira) foray into the mazy morass of web intercourse; the introduction of Jules (Schafer), a trans woman whose transness is neither the purpose of her character nor the supply of her demons; the too typically manic pixied Jules’s gravitational, consuming reference to Rue. The present’s at occasions unsparing and deglamorized dealing with of Rue’s dependancy was refreshing if gutting; identical, too, for its depiction of intercourse as a curious, high-stakes battleground between the women and boys. Euphoria, at its greatest, approaches the issues of right this moment’s teenagers (and fogeys) with revelatory candor, even at its most laughably and delightfully outlandish. However this season has catered to its worst, bloodiest impulses – ones it may use some good outdated teenage cleaning soap to clean out.
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