Why Shazam Getting Good Reviews When Was Stupid

Every week, nosotros pick a new episode of the week. It could be good. It could be bad. It will always be interesting. You can read the archives hither . The episode of the calendar week for June sixteen through 22 is the pilot of HBO's Euphoria.

The true audience of HBO's new teen drama Euphoria isn't really teens. It'south not fifty-fifty the parents of teens. No, the truthful audience for Euphoria is parents of kids who are about 5 to 10 years old, who nevertheless take relatively good relationships with those kids merely can see the storm clouds on the horizon.

The show's airplane pilot swerves wildly betwixt careful observation and trying too difficult. I almost had to stop watching it afterward the first five minutes, which summarize the protagonist's life up until now; she's 17 years old, just Euphoria begins with the assertion that the last time she was happy was in the womb, a sentiment that feels similar it must take been ripped off from a Hot Topic T-shirt. The episode has gotten a lot of attention for depicting "how the teens alive today," merely its greatest forcefulness isn't what's timely near it merely what'southward eternal about information technology.

Teens are ever defenseless betwixt a growing emotional and physical maturity and the fact that their brains are racing to catch upward. Their wildly racing emotions and thoughts make them platonic protagonists for stories, because they volition often embark on completely subversive courses of action with the finality that they are doing exactly what they need to be doing.

Simply too much of the Euphoria pilot feels like leftover "What the kids are getting up to today — it might shock you! More at 11!" paranoia from the '90s, reheated for today's viewers. And very little of the show actually seems equally if it'south tapped into the way kids alive in 2019. It'south disappointing.

Yet every so often, the evidence volition present a scene or image and so beautiful that I can't write it off entirely. Information technology's a series at war with itself — two shows in i.

Testify #1: the same old "Why are the teens so messed up?" panic, directed at parents of kids who are almost teens

Rue is struggling after she gets back from rehab.

HBO

The opening montage tracing the life of Rue (Zendaya) to appointment nearly put me off of Euphoria entirely because it's so arch and blunt — but non in a fashion that seems to serve the voice of the grapheme. Instead, it seems designed to provoke her presumed adult audition. Rue doesn't feel similar a person and then much as a collection of storytelling tics in her voiceover narration.

In one sequence, Rue, as a little daughter, goes from counting the panels in an overhead light in her home to sitting in a physician'south office (where it's stated that she might have a host of "possible" mental wellness conditions) to watching her mother divvy up pills that she will need to accept, 24-hour interval afterward mean solar day, to manage the atmospheric condition she's been officially diagnosed with. (We don't find out what they are.) It feels vaguely relevant, in that Rue later develops a drug addiction, but it also feels like a mag cover story nigh kids being overmedicated come to life. The point is less to say something, and more to shock the viewer. Wait at all those pills! For such a young girl!

Leaning on details virtually what the teens are up to in an effort to shock parents — and, let's face it, the media, who have already dubbed Euphoria "controversial" despite nobody actually seeming to be all that mad most it — is a time-honored tactic, i that resurfaces in pop civilization every five to 10 years.

The '90s had Larry Clark'south Kids, in which bored teens wandered New York Metropolis just looking to get high or have sex, the better to feel something, and the scholarly book Reviving Ophelia, whose central argument was substantially that TV made teen girls feel bad about themselves, causing them to brand worse and worse choices. 2003's Thirteen — in which a daughter who's just turned the titular historic period falls down a rabbit hole of depravity — took a similar tack. Simply there are as well glossier takes on this basic theme, most notably the CW series Gossip Girl, which ran from 2007 to 2012.

A lot of Euphoria follows in the basic footsteps of these earlier projects (every bit well as the Israeli series Euphoria, which this one has been adjusted from by writer Sam Levinson, simply very freely, since the original was fix in the '90s), while making a few attempts to offering social commentary that's rooted in the present. I liked one scene where a girl paused sex with her boyfriend when he began to have it in a direction she didn't await or want — and he really listened and responded.

But that same moment came consummate with a mini lecture from Rue on the ubiquity of porn, an unnecessary particular that fabricated me roll my eyes. And other scenes seemed trapped in a haze of "The teens are doin' drugs! And havin' sex!" that was maybe a couple of steps removed from the archetype '30s "teens in peril" movie Reefer Madness.

Curiously, the teens of Euphoria seem to take very little relationship to technology so far. They text, sure, and they know how to search PornHub. Merely social media is a minimal presence in their lives, and they don't really intendance about YouTube. (For a improve accept on teens' relationship to tech, check out 2018's 8th Grade.)

This lack of tech at the center of some of these stories speaks to what Euphoria is really about: kids who were teens in the '90s — and who call up what they got upward to and then — looking back on those days with some degree of clarity, and then looking at their own kids and being fearful for what they might get upward to in the side by side five to ten years.

The problem is that this approach denies the teenage characters whatever agency. They simply become a faceless mob of teens who do bad things, and that'southward that. Hereafter episodes (I've seen iv) build on this foundation in interesting ways, but Euphoria can never quite escape being nigh "the teens" instead of just a teen.

Except when it does.

Show #2: a lovely coming-of-age story most two girls who find each other correct when they demand to

Jules and Rue heal and decompress after the house political party.

HBO

Zendaya is one of my favorite actors of her upward-and-coming generation, and her world-weary impact is perfect to play teen characters who speak with the vox of 30-something screenwriters, because Zendaya has seemed world-weary since she was on the Disney Channel as a teen. (Sidebar: If you are contemplating a new film version of Cabaret, Hollywood — and I know y'all accept to be! — Zendaya would be a phenomenal Sally Bowles.) When she'due south monologuing as Rue, Euphoria is at its worst. Merely when she's immune to just be Rue, there's something undeniably appealing most the show.

But 1 of the reasons Euphoria's pilot is so ungainly and overloaded with shock value is that it's too all prelude for the friendship that develops between Rue and the new girl in town, Jules (Hunter Schafer).

Jules is trans (something indicated to the audience non via monologue but through a quick shot of her injecting hormones into her thigh), and it'south welcome that Euphoria doesn't tie Jules's self-subversive streak to her transness but, instead, to her devastation in the wake of her parents' divorce. (As Rue indicates in her voiceover, something big must have gone downwards if Jules'due south dad received sole custody.)

In a way, I'one thousand foregrounding Jules's trans status non because the bear witness foregrounds that aspect of the character — it really, really doesn't — but because I haven't really seen a teenage trans character treated and so non-salaciously on TV. She'southward just some other troubled kid. The first time I saw Jules, fifty-fifty earlier I knew she was trans, I sparked to something in her, like Rue does the first time the two meet. And and so the show revealed her trans condition, and the penny dropped.

What'southward neat about the connection between Rue and Jules is that both are trying to outrun something in their pasts. Rue doesn't know what she'due south outrunning and wants to remember — right downward to the deadline exploitative way she talks about being born iii days afterwards 9/xi — where Jules very much does remember and wants desperately to forget. Rue tells us about her life in encyclopedic detail, but Jules's backstory before she made it to the LA suburbs, where Euphoria takes identify, is hidden from united states of america. Something bad happened in her parents' marriage, and now she's using online dating apps to prepare up rendezvouses with much older men. (The human she meets up with in the airplane pilot turns out to exist the father of a classmate, a soapy twist I probably should have hated simply totally loved.)

When Euphoria pulls dorsum from Rue and Jules to focus on its wider teen ensemble, or the kids' parents, or something like that, it struggles and feels alarmist. But when it zooms in on the growing friendship betwixt these ii girls, there'due south a kind of hushful mystery to it. In these scenes, Levinson's articulate skill at observing how these kids might collaborate with each other weds perfectly to the fact that he tin can never fully become within their heads, nor can he entirely empathise what Rue and Jules'southward friendship is, or why information technology forms so rapidly. Their near-immediate bond embodies the kind of alchemy that no writer could really exist privy to.

Euphoria excels at portraying those moments of hushful, immediate electricity between 2 people, the ones that hitting you out of the bluish as a teenager and don't happen every bit ofttimes as yous become older. I kind of hated Euphoria's pilot, only I kept watching farther episodes considering of Rue and Jules's dizzy-sick meeting at a house political party — I felt it in a way the balance of the show only couldn't approach.

Euphoria wanted so badly to shock me, to make me fret over how thoroughly the kids are messed upward, that I was ultimately nigh impressed that it did the exact opposite in the end. These kids might party and experiment and try on new personas for size, only down at the cadre of it, they're going to be simply fine.

Euphoria airs Sundays at ten pm Eastern on HBO . Previous episodes are available on HBO's streaming platforms.

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Source: https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/6/23/18701226/euphoria-premiere-pilot-episode-1-recap-zendaya-hbo

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