![]() As soon as we begin to sympathize with her extreme anhedonic haze, her narration punctuates it with cracks about watching “Love Island” for twenty-two hours straight. When it comes to Rue’s psychic condition, “Euphoria” veers from flippant to grandiose and back again, such as in a Season 1 episode in which she is admitted to the hospital with a kidney infection because she was too depressed to go pee. Rue is supposedly our emotional center, and the show uses her suffering as a vector to telegraph characterological fullness, but these attempts often feel unsatisfying, partly because the show is unable to pick a consistent tone. But despite the potential juiciness of these characters, “Euphoria” is not a show to watch for deep dives into its protagonists’ psychologies-counterintuitive for a show where so much circles around addiction and mental health. There’s also Nate’s father, Cal (Eric Dane), a successful contractor who will stop at nothing to hide his rapey sexual encounters with various younger gay men and trans women, Jules among them, whom he pursues on a dating app under the handle “DominantDaddy.” Season 2 brings in a few new characters, among them Elliot (Dominic Fike), a classmate who loves drugs almost as much as Rue does and Laurie (Martha Kelly), a dealer whose suburban-mom looks and creepily flat manner make her the most terrifying character in recent television.Ĭlearly, there’s a lot to work with here. they’ll do anything.” (One thing Nate does is get her a chinchilla coat just like that of her idol, Ginger, Sharon Stone’s cunning showgirl in Scorsese’s “Casino.”) Skulking in the background are the sensitive Fez (Angus Cloud), who is a drug dealer, and Ashtray (Javon Walton), his trigger-happy younger brother and business partner. ![]() We also have Cassie (Sydney Sweeney), a wide-eyed love addict Lexi (Maude Apatow), Cassie’s good-girl sister McKay (Algee Smith), a stressed-out football player and Maddy (Alexa Demie), Nate’s on-again, off-again girlfriend, who teaches herself how to mimic porn stars in bed, because “if you make a guy feel confident and powerful . . . ![]() They include Nate (Jacob Elordi), a hot, violent quarterback with daddy issues Jules (Hunter Schafer), an artistic young trans woman with mommy issues, who is Rue’s best friend and love interest and Kat (Barbie Ferreira), an insecure classmate who gets a confidence boost by becoming a cam girl, “collecting her motherfucking bag” from a variety of “pay pigs” whom she humiliates online. Rue’s friends are post-9/11 babies, too, and their everyday reality, in an unnamed Southern California suburb, seems engineered to inject despair into the hearts of any viewers who are foolish enough to still believe that the so-called children are our future. “I know it all seems sad, but guess what? I didn’t build this system, nor did I fuck it up.” But is the source of Rue’s troubles her own psychic makeup, or, simply, the way we live now? “I was born three days after 9/11,” she drones affectlessly, as images of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers play on a delivery-room TV, in a flashback. Rue is a pill addict fresh out of rehab, following an overdose, but, as she insists in the show’s pilot, she has “no intention of staying clean.” Her father died when she was fourteen, compounding a host of mental-health issues that she had been struggling with-and receiving medication for-since early childhood: O.C.D., generalized anxiety disorder, possible bipolar disorder. The series is narrated by the seventeen-year-old Rue, played by the former Disney child star Zendaya, tangle-haired and pie-eyed in the role. He struggled with drug dependency in his youth, and seems to have converted his personal experience into the show’s operatic vision. Levinson is thirty-seven, and the son of the film director Barry Levinson. The show, which is based on an Israeli series of the same name, was created in 2019 by Sam Levinson, for HBO. A grab bag of music-video-style moments, satirical pastiches, druggy fantasy sequences, quasi-pornographic sexual encounters, and high-octane action scenes, “Euphoria” is a stomach-turning, hectic, maximalist experience: an audacious mess that, if not always pleasurable, is impossible to dismiss or look away from. This is about as close as television gets to endurance art. The first episode of Season 2 contains one erect penis and two flaccid ones, a drug-dealing grandmother in hot pants, a girl shooting up in a car, a twelve-year-old with face tattoos, some bathroom coitus, a near-overdose on opioids-thwarted by a snort of Adderall-and a baby eating cigarette butts. The teen drama “Euphoria,” which is now in its second season, airs once a week: a lucky thing, since even a single episode of the series can feel like a binge.
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