![]() ![]() Gossip being fundamental to both, intrigue has swirled in the past couple months around alleged behind-the-scenes drama, with much of the frustration for the season’s shortcomings directed at Levinson, the creator whom fans love to hate. (Levinson, the creator who wrote and directed every episode this season, is 37.) As Delia Cai recently argued in Vanity Fair, Euphoria inflames the millennial generation’s already intense fascination with high school, particularly as a framework for articulating life online – what else is Twitter if not a more exposed and cutthroat high-school cafeteria? Though it is HBO’s youngest-skewing show, Euphoria is best understood as a millennial’s revisionist fantasy of their own proto-social media high school days, if the current digital hellscape was our teenage playground. Euphoria shares many of the same tropes – a blonde v brunette love triangle, absent parents, etc – dressed up with enough expensive cinematography, fine acting, HBO budget and Dare-invoking material to merit serious critical discussion (and recaps on TikTok). (See: Tony-winning playwright Jeremy O Harris, a producer on the show and close friend of Levinson’s, sparring with critics over his tweet that Euphoria was “made for ppl with an intellect for CINEMA and not the impatience of TELEVISION” and likening it to Dickens).ĭickens it is not, but Euphoria does have the evergreen appeal of the unrealistic teen soap, operating in the lane of the original Gossip Girl, Degrassi, Skins, Home and Away, One Tree Hill and The OC – shows depicting high schoolers played by hot twentysomething actors on an inherently ridiculous merry-go-round of drama. “It’s a beautiful thing when you have a character that so many people are able to relate to.”) The show has spawned a universe of memes – the Super Bowl as Maddy v Cassie, actor Alexa Demie’s mysterious age – and navel-gazy but immersive Twitter beef. (So, apparently, do some of the cast – “it’s fascinating,” said Sydney Sweeney of her character’s highly memeable bathtub moment. But I, too, enjoy submerging in the current swirl of reactions, reactions to the reactions, and gossip around Euphoria. Midway through the season, I wrote that the show’s lurid style, lack of character development and general chaos had become both exhausting and boring I found the finale to be a gratuitous trainwreck, save for a few quiet moments with genuine star Zendaya as (tidily recovered!) drug addict Rue. ![]() I’ll admit that I fall on the negative pole of the Euphoria debate. I am humbled,” he posted on Instagram stories along with some memes and tweets mocking his song.)īarbie Ferreira, Alexa Demie and Sydney Sweeney. (Fike, at least, was a good sport about this – “The internet remains undefeated. You get the dopamine hits of beautiful images and caps-locked emotion, swirled with wild tonal shifts, packaged with such maximalism and gratuity as to demand a reaction, and emerge wired by the chaos and worn out by the whole cycle. Watching the second season finale – in which Lexi’s (Maude Apatow) tell-all play devolved into a catfight, beloved drug dealer Fezco’s (Angus Cloud) house went down in a hail of police gunfire, and cast member Dominic Fike sang an entire original song – felt like witnessing the life cycle of a Twitter Event. How did it become a social media lightning rod?Įuphoria is a TV show of and for the internet – appealing to our instinct to be included and our evergreen fascination with high school, stoking a range of reactions from outrage to appreciation (or often both), offering looks and plenty of avenues for takes. Call it disastrous, sublime, exhausting, narcissistic, magnetic or all of the above – no show aims for and captures the online discourse right now better than Euphoria. Its buzziness is helped rather than hindered by a polarizing and, for many, narratively disappointing season that sidelined beloved characters, dropped plot lines, prioritized elaborate and visually ornate tangents over character development, doubled down on the drug abuse, dialed up the graphic violence, and went so far up its own ass as to have a character stage a Broadway-budget play about the show for its final two episodes. In other words, catnip for the online crowd. This is by design: Euphoria, adapted by Sam Levinson from the Israeli show of the same name, is audacious in style, almost pugnaciously provocative in substance, with imitable peacocking fashion and easily memeable cutaways. According to Twitter, the drama is the most tweeted-about show of the (still young) decade, with 34m tweets in the US alone. ![]() But perhaps more impressive, and telling, than its 2022 viewing stats is Euphoria’s digital footprint.
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