Euphoria (Season 1)
Review of Season One of Euphoria
Euphoria has been out for a couple of years now, but because I didn’t really care about television or the popular shows at the time, I never actually got to watching it whenever it was initially popular. At the time of writing this, Season Two is slowly dropping episode by episode on HBO Max, and at the beginning of 2022 I sat down and got an HBO Max subscription because of my work. I am a freelance entertainment journalist on the side, so I kind of have to keep my pulse on the trends.
Euphoria’s season one was the first thing I watched when I got my subscription, and, honestly, I had no idea about what it was really about going into it.
I knew that there were a lot of good makeup looks, which is cool, but I never actually bothered to read up on the plot or figure out if it was something I liked. With that being said, let’s begin this review.
Euphoria is told through the eyes of Rue, a teenage addict that observes the world around her.
In Euphoria, our main character is Rue. She is wonderfully played by Zendaya, who has recently blown up in movies like Dune and Spider-Man. The very first episode, she explains that there’s something very wrong with her, as ever-since she was a kid, she’s had a penchant for lashing out mentally and having mood swings.
Later in the series she Googles if she’s bipolar and seems to decide she’s that, but Rue is just a lost kid. She started having a drug addiction when her father, as he was dying from cancer, didn’t notice she swiped some of his painkillers. This sets the scene of the modern-day she lives in, as she has just gotten out of rehab since she almost died during an overdose.
Each episode revolves largely around one of the main cast, but it’s narrated through Rue’s eyes. Rue is the glue keeping this entire show together, because no matter who we bounce the camera around to, we always return to the story of Rue and her love interest: Jules.
Each of the main characters has one of their own struggles, ones reflective of contemporary society and youth today. There’s sex, abuse, sexuality and pornography, drugs, LGBTQ+ issues, and simply trying to find your voice in a world that’s a little difficult to live within.
The catalyst to the start of this series is the arrives of Jules, a transgender girl who’s just moved into town. She meets Rue at a party after being threatened by local football king Nate, and the two hit it off immediately and innocently sleep together in the same bed. The narration tells us that they’re to become best friends, and, in a way, that makes sense.
Jules is everything Rue is not; she’s clean, girly, likes to do her makeup in whimsical ways. Rue is just a tomboy and an addict pretending to be coming clean, until she falls in love with Jules.
Suddenly the stakes are a lot higher because Jules explicitly states that she doesn’t want to be best friends with an addict.
But everything also comes unraveling when Jules sleeps with someone from her hometown, leading to that dramatic decision towards the end of the show on whether to stay or to leave.
The show’s biggest antagonist serves itself in the form of Nate, the football player. He seems to have tendencies to lash out violently, as he even chokes his own girlfriend hard and beats a guy up to the point where he ends up in the hospital (just because Nate thought he slept with Maddie).
Maddie’s story explains that she, like Sydney Sweeney’s character, always returns to the same scenarios with Nate because of how it feels familiar. She doesn’t want to work or put effort into her life, just exist. And Nate gives her everything she wants, even if it brutally hurts sometimes.
Other side stories include Barbie Ferreira’s character, who, after losing her virginity, starts to go around in bondage wear and becomes a cam girl on PornHub, and how Sweeney’s character’s father was a drug addict, too, and she searches for a replacement father in every man she dates, thus leading her to getting pregnant and having an abortion.
I kind of figured this show was going to go way out there halfway through the first episode, and I was right. It’s very sexual, very Generation Z, and sometimes you wonder if these kids are high schoolers or college students.
Euphoria is, however, quite seductive. It has very dark coloring with pops of color, and costuming and makeup plays a key role into deciphering the character’s intentions and true feelings in a situation.
It’s gorgeous to watch because of this, albeit it feels a bit fragmented because of the way it splits into the individual character’s stories. I was thinking its storytelling could be a bitter better, because, at the end of the day, the only one I was genuinely interested in the most was Rue.
She was the most fleshed out character who didn’t fall into a very specific role, and I wanted to see more of her and not just her voice.
Overall Thoughts
It is a good show, I’ll give it that. I watched all of season one without skipping anything, which is an achievement. It’s hard to keep my attention like that, but because the show genuinely had some beautiful shots and styling I kept watching.
I do wonder how this will impact how people view our society and generation because of how crude it is—it almost encourages and justifies an entire generation to potentially use drugs because it romanticizes it through the styling.
We don’t actually see Rue wanting to get help and fix her life, but instead she decides to change because someone gave her an ultimatum, which ended up being love.
I hope season two gives her a reason outside of Jules to get clean, because as much as you love someone, if they leave, that’s how you descend back into chaos.
And that’s exactly what ends up happening on Euphoria, making it a bit less satisfying because Rue is exactly where she left off.
