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Euphoria debuted the summer before my senior year of high school in Oakland. Its star, Zendaya, had been born and raised in Oakland and was something of a hometown hero; Angus Cloud, a first-time actor who became a fan favorite as the lovable drug dealer Fezco and the show’s breakout star, had been raised in Oakland too, and he and Zendaya had gone to the same high school at different times. But even beyond the geographic proximities of the cast, the show felt like it spoke to my classmates and me. For each of the show’s dysfunctional lead characters, I could point to a peer with similar problems.
Maddy Perez, played by 30-year-old Alexa Demie, is in an on-and-off relationship with her physically and verbally abusive boyfriend, Nate Jacobs, played by 24-year-old Jacob Elordi. Kat Hernandez, played by model Barbie Ferreira, reacts to an experience of nonconsensual recording during sex by becoming a camgirl in a misguided attempt to reclaim control of her sexuality. Cassie Howard, played by 24-year-old Sydney Sweeney, suffers from her promiscuous reputation and is the victim of revenge porn. Jules Vaughn, played by Hunter Schafer, has her earliest sexual experiences with a rotation of much older men she meets online. At my high school and at neighboring schools, similar stories were not uncommon.
As for the main character, Rue—with her myriad addictions, constant relapses, and scheming pursuits to get high at any cost—I could name countless counterparts: kids who took handfuls of Benadryl to try to hallucinate, sipped a mixture of cough syrup and Sprite out of water bottles in class, experimented with opioids. (One acquaintance emerged from rehab and contacted me for the first time in years to ask if I could send him $20.)
Even before Euphoria, my former classmates occupied a transient position of coolness because of their self-destructive traits. They were frenetically throwing themselves into all the treacherous and injurious acts that we’d been trained, by popular culture and the media that preceded Euphoria, to believe were the markers of young adulthood. Social media was central to the unfurling of their tragic sagas, inundating their peers’ Instagram feeds with photos of red cups, bags of bud, hot-boxed cars—all of the indications of a so-called real coming of age.
Notoriety and popularity were the same thing. The appeal of these acts lay in the public proof of participation. They had sex so that their peers would know they had sex; they did drugs so their peers would know they did drugs. They were motivated, it seemed, by the petrifying prospect of being left behind, of growing up too slowly, of making it to graduation day and having no scars to show for it.
My criticism of Euphoria, which returns this Sunday for its second season, is not that it’s inaccurate; on the contrary, I find it horrifyingly on target. My criticism lies in the way it aestheticizes the traumas it depicts, an aestheticization that my generation is particularly vulnerable to. Perhaps the only character who truly faces the consequences for her vices is Rue; the other characters repeatedly endanger themselves and others and yet miraculously continue to avoid major catastrophe or even parental intervention. They dance through morally and legally dubious scenarios to a theatrical soundtrack and emerge mostly unscathed and always flawlessly groomed, episode after episode. While it may have been intended to serve as a warning, Euphoria often feels more like an instructional tutorial or a road map, one that sensationalizes its subject matter while neglecting to fully disclaim its risks and hazards.
In some ways, Euphoria is following down a well-beaten path. The nihilistic teen drama has been a cinematic cultural staple for decades. When Nicholas Ray’s landmark film Rebel Without a Cause was released in 1955, it was banned in New Zealand out of fear it would incite teenage delinquency. Film critic Roger Ebert described Larry Clark’s 1995 coming-of-age film Kids as “the kind of movie that needs to be talked about afterward. It doesn’t tell us what it means.” Similar in that regard, Euphoria seems to have no thesis beyond evocative documentation—but optically the show exists in a lane of its own.
The cast certainly doesn’t look like your average high school classroom, made up almost entirely of former or current models above age 21. The main characters are all stunningly beautiful and decidedly postpubescent, and their day-to-day attire frequently features glitter, immaculate makeup, and over-the-top outfits, which they wear even through their most traumatizing experiences. The cinematography of the show almost resembles that of a music video, with moody, glowing lighting and dramatic, elaborate motion shots.
Euphoria’s aesthetics ignited a cultural fervor that inspired everything from social-media trends to themed parties—even influencing runway shows at New York Fashion Week so heavily that W magazine dubbed the phenomenon “the Euphoria effect.” Vogue ran a story on the impact of the show on the beauty industry. This combination of storytelling and masterful marketing is dangerous for a demographic already extraordinarily susceptible to visual manipulation, and it is what sets Euphoria apart from its predecessors.
Raised on social media, my generation has been force-fed images of ourselves at an unprecedented frequency. Teenagers are socialized to be experts in personal branding. We are trained to create and curate quasi-professional images of ourselves and our lives—the more hypersexualized and seemingly exclusive, the better. This has primed us as consumers, and as people, to value the visual above all else.
Teenagers may have already been overexposed and over-adultified and already participating in the kinds of things Euphoria depicts—but the last thing we needed was a vehicle to further romanticize our self-destructiveness. The last thing we needed was the conglomeration of all of our local sources of social pressure into one glimmery, sexy national emblem for what it meant to be an angsty teen. The problem with Euphoria isn’t that it is attempting to endorse what it illustrates; the problem with Euphoria is that it isn’t attempting to do anything at all. And by simply showing what it shows, how it shows it, it inadvertently endorses it anyway.
Like many of my peers, I was riveted by the first season of Euphoria’s acting and production and the relatability of its characters. It felt like tacit permission for all of our most irresponsible decisions. With the second season comes an opportunity for the show to redeem itself and retract that permission—or to double down on its faults. Previews of the new season have depicted similar visual and emotional themes as the first, but if season two cannot find a thesis to accompany its visuals, Euphoria will find itself right where it left off.
Samuel Getachew is a poet, writer, and model from Oakland. He is a freshman at Yale University.