The portrayal of this hot-girl friend group is cannily sensitive to how teen-age society has progressed when Kat tells her friends that she’s a virgin, they scold her warmheartedly. Our omniscient storyteller, Rue gives us the backstory of the show’s three other major characters: her best friend, Jules Vaughn (Hunter Schafer), a repressed jock named Nate (Jacob Elordi), and Kat (Barbie Ferreira), a smart-aleck who hides a secret Internet life. The urine of friends, kept warm in little pharmaceutical bottles strapped to her thigh, tricks her mother’s at-home drug tests. At the beginning of the show, she has just returned from rehab, where she didn’t so much get clean as get cunning. Rue’s habit is self-medication, an overcorrection to the stifling regimen she was put on as a young child to help manage O.C.D., anxiety, and a personality disorder. When Rue consumes them, she is overcome with a rush of the opposite of the show’s title: nothingness, a pitch blackness, a silence that is, she hopes, like being dead. Her drug of choice is pills, mostly, which she buys (on credit) from a regretful dealer and his face-tattooed partner. Her sister Gia (Storm Reid) found her overdosed in her bedroom. In the pilot episode, our protagonist, Rue Bennett (Zendaya), her narration heavy like medicinal syrup, explains that she was born only days after 9/11 the planes crashing on loop on television was her generation’s first film, their primal political event. That said, I shouldn’t undersell the bleakness of “Euphoria.” There are dead-eyed, graphic sex scenes, nonconsensual-sex tapes, beatings, underage camming, and chronic male nudity. Last week the president of the Parents Television Council warned that the show “appears to be overtly, intentionally, marketing extremely graphic adult content-sex, violence, profanity and drug use-to teens and preteens.” But “Euphoria,” which is interestingly naïve itself, will destroy the innocence only of adults who wish to maintain the illusion that sex, violence, profanity, and drug use, not to mention revenge porn, are not in the province of high-school life. It styles itself as a punishing Gen Z exposé, channelling the spirit of movies like “Kids” and “Gummo,” here to make “Skins” seem basic. “Euphoria,” a new teen drama from HBO and A24’s television company, is here to denude us of such naïve thinking. Stern and chivalrous and goal-oriented, New Age patriots and effective workers, they will pull the planet back into orbit. Graduates in the college class of 2019, they have been “raised by cynics,” the magazine tells us, and have reacted by becoming “clear-eyed, economic pragmatists.” They will avoid the mistakes of their sinner predecessors-the gig economy and the Internet’s irony-poisoning, climate-change ambivalence, and millennial listlessness. In this week’s Newsweek, for instance, a group of smiling, multiethnic students are trotted out as representatives of the post-millennial cohort that’s become known as Gen Z. Attempts to know the soul of the new generation always tremble with the fetishes and the embarrassments of aging ones.
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