#HBO EUPHORIA SERIES#

The series premiered on June 16, 2019, on HBO.Īppearances Key Main cast (credited) Recurring cast (3 or more episodes) Guest cast (1–2 episodes) Actor If there’s one thing Euphoria understands perfectly, it’s that.Euphoria is an American teen drama television series created by Sam Levinson, which centres on a group of dysfunctional high school students at East Highland High School. Regardless of whether your teenage years were spent drinking cider in a field, playing video games online with friends, studying hard to master a musical instrument or, as here, dissecting brutal sexual experiences in a culture of constant surveillance, there is a fundamental truth shared by almost everyone: adolescence is horribly cruel, and sweetly naive, in ever-shifting combinations of the two.

For all of its bleak vision, sympathy is not in short supply, and it is hard not to begin to root for these kids to fight their way through to the other side. The heroically droll Kat promises hidden depths. Rue is a scammer and a hedonist, but she still feels guilty about what she is putting her family through. When Jules meets an older man for sex, the abuse of power is complicated and the show is all the more powerful for resisting the urge to be didactic about it. When Rue meets her new best friend, Jules (Hunter Schafer), who has just moved to the suburbs, it becomes a semi-romantic adventure and the series’ ability to conjure up the intoxicating vitality of relationships like that is remarkable. There are deep sophistications hidden within its more straightforwardly angsty digressions. But I’m also not even sure that it works as well for a young audience as it does for those of us who can look back with relief that this painful, dramatic part of life is over.Įuphoria will certainly not appeal to all tastes, but it is far less brash than it has been made out to be. If that were the case, it makes substance-fuelled house parties look as appealing as following that paper boat down the drain just because a clown told you to, so I’m not sure there is much to worry about. The controversy that accompanied Euphoria’s debut on HBO centred on the assumption that it was aimed at teenage viewers, and perhaps even younger. “Once he tried to finger me on the dancefloor without my permission, but, it’s America,” says Rue, drily, of the furious jock Nate, a sinister presence for whom the words “daddy issues” do not even come close. Every character here is hyper-articulate, quippy and analytical, using glibness as a defence against the many wounding experiences with which they are not yet able to cope. One of Rue’s drug dealers is a child with a tattooed face and a vocabulary made almost entirely of chemical formulas he is yet to be explained, but his presence adds to the overall woozy feel. Euphoria has a tendency to go off on dream-like tangents, which is both self-conscious and charming. She does so with the precision of a professional. Rue has been in rehab for the summer, following an accidental overdose, and after a period of being clean, her first mission at home is to get as high as she possibly can once more. The former Disney star Zendaya is reinvented as the self-destructive, self-loathing Rue, in what is a truly astonishing, mesmerising performance, upending every expectation of what she could do. Nor did I fuck it up,” she intones, with all the wisdom of a wordy 16-year-old trying on her own maturity for size. “I know it may all seem sad, but guess what? I didn’t build this system. She has mental health issues that have been variously diagnosed and medicated, but which she prefers to address with her own risky prescription of illegal substances. Rue is our lead, an omniscient narrator who weaves with us in and out of her peers’ lives. It opens with a heavy teen-angst monologue that points out one of the most horrifying aspects of the whole affair, at least for this particular viewer – that its protagonists were mostly born after 9/11. Euphoria is far better than its surface look-at-me neediness, though.

Hbo euphoria