WHAT IT'S ABOUT: Rue Bennett (Zendaya) is the teen daughter of a loving mother, Gia (Storm Reid), and is struggling with OCD, drug addiction and a raging self-identity crisis. One day the storm clouds break: Jules Vaughan (transgender actress and LGBTQ activist Hunter Schafer) arrives in her well-groomed California neighborhood. Jules, immediately, has to deal with her own major crises, notably high school jock and sociopath Nate Jacobs (Jacob Elordi) and his pyscho-perv father Carl Jacobs (Eric Dane, "Grey's Anatomy"). The show is based on an Israeli hit, and written by Sam Levinson, son of Barry.
MY SAY: "Euphoria" can be seen, or experienced, a couple of ways _ as either an angry, jumbled, plotless screed or, because this is HBO which usually knows what it's doing, the bleakest show you're likely to see this summer.
The latter seems indisputable. These kids born after the turn of the century in a privileged corner of the country have all been swept up and contained in that pen which has contained the rest of us to varying degrees _ the internet _ where the most desolate human impulses find purchase, then thrive. In "Euphoria," in fact, the internet has been weaponized: So-called heteronormative feelings have become toxic, or turned into agents of torture. Virtual sex predominates, and real sex is stylized on what someone's seen on Pornhub. "Euphoria" can be, and often is, aggressively dystopic.
