The Dark Teen Show That Pushes the Edge of Provocation
HBO’s <em>Euphoria</em> joins a long list of works that have appalled and thrilled in equal measure. But does it have more to say?
If every generation gets the brittle, nihilist, painfully “real,” sexually joyless cultural rendering it deserves, then the good news for Generation Z is that shows signs of progress. The 1980s had Bret Easton Ellis’s , a coolly disaffected portrait of life in Los Angeles that featured heroin, rape, snuff films, and a 12-year-old sex slave. The ’90s had , Harmony Korine’s bleakly disaffected portrayal of teenage skater kids sharing drugs and HIV. The 2000s had , Jamie Brittain’s entertainingly disaffected British import about pill-popping, bed-hopping high schoolers. Each work sparked its own kind of moral panic, accompanied by a clamor of voices urging audiences to heed
