Euphoria is the latest work to create a "moral panic" about teens

The Atlantic

"If every generation gets the brittle, nihilist, painfully 'real,' sexually joyless cultural rendering it deserves, then the good news for Generation Z is that Euphoria shows signs of progress," says Sophie Gilbert. "The 1980s had Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero, a coolly disaffected portrait of life in Los Angeles that featured heroin, rape, snuff films, and a 12-year-old sex slave. The ’90s had Kids, Harmony Korine’s bleakly disaffected portrayal of teenage skater kids sharing drugs and HIV. The 2000s had Skins, Jamie Brittain’s entertainingly disaffected British import about pill-popping, bed-hopping high schoolers. Each work sparked its own kind of moral panic, accompanied by a clamor of voices urging audiences to heed the alarming truth of How Young People Live Now. Which, well, kind of. Less Than Zero, it transpired, was less an accurate picture of Gen X dysfunction than it was a book inspired by Ellis himself, with his Bennington College mystique, his 'suitcase full of drugs,' and his father’s $40 million property commissions. Kids was mired in the predilections and obsessions of Korine and the director/photographer Larry Clark. Euphoria, too, is not so much an all-encompassing portrait of a generation than a work based on the writer Sam Levinson’s specific experiences of addiction, anxiety, and recovery. In its best moments, it’s a thoughtful, openhearted story about teenagers trying to navigate life as the first fully-online generation, test subjects in an unfettered landscape of d*ck pics, adult predators, and synthetic hallucinogens. But it’s also the kind of drama so relentlessly provocative—images of erect penises crop up with the persistence and frequency of weeds in springtime—that it prompts a question: Who is this supposed to be for?" Gilbert adds: "Trolling the Family Research Council with graphic scenes of underage sex, violence, and drug use is easy to do. What’s harder is using the same kind of imagery and action to make a point, or a change. From the first four episodes of Euphoria, it’s hard to discern whether the series will take advantage of its magnetic stars Zendaya and (Hunter) Schafer, and their palpable chemistry, to tell a different kind of story from the glumly incendiary ones we’ve seen before."

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• Claims that Euphoria is simply Skins for Gen Z are reductive at best: "Euphoria doesn’t wildly subvert the tropes that Skins—or, frankly, any other teen drama from My So-Called Life, to The O.C., to Riverdale—propped up," says Ashley Reese. "Teen excess and exploration, tortured golden boys, and It girls are the bread and butter of any teen series. But beyond making these themes 2019 compliant—the show’s 30-year-old creator, Sam Levinson (director of Assassination Nation) wrote the script based on his own experience with addiction and is certain that it’s updated enough—it’s clear that while Skins may have popularized the sleek and shamelessly raw teen series, the darkness of Euphoria makes Skins look like pure comedy."
• We've seen shocking teen portrayals before, but this time Zendaya is playing Robert Downey Jr.'s character in Less Than Zero
• What exactly does Drake do as Euphoria's executive producer? Most of the cast seems to have only seen him once