The first week of school, my roommates and I found ourselves staying up to finish the first season of HBO’s Euphoria. I found it well produced for two main reasons:
1.The main character/narrator Rue struggles with mental health.
Rue goes through manic states and finds herself figuring out when her obsession with drugs began, why her mother and sister worry about her, and why her friend Jules is so important to her. We see her in a bad episode of depression, where all her daily thoughts in her dark room are revealed because she is the narrator of the show. She even describes the process of getting out of bed to be too much, which leads her to getting a kidney infection because she is unable to pee.
2. It takes risk…but for all of the right reasons!
Two big “risks” Euphoria took were:
a) Having Rue’s best friend be a transgender female. Her name is Jules and she is portrayed as Jules, not “the trans-girl”. As viewers, we don’t even know she is transgender until the show rewinds time and shows her transition and her previous relationship with her mom before her parents became divorced. Jules enjoys things that every girl traditionally does, from wearing makeup, to going to parties, loving glitter, and dressing up. Jules tells us she “wants to conquer femininity,” which to many has different meanings. This portrayal of Jules is SO important because Hollywood is at a time, where due to the development of social media, representation is very important. Agencies like GLADD (a media force) assist in promoting and achieving this by rewriting the script for LGBTQ+ acceptance. This, in turn, wakes up Hollywood to shape narratives so it leads to a cultural change.
b) Being rated MA there are a lot of sexual scenes for a show about high-school teenagers, but this how the topic of sex becomes normalized–through the spread of it in media which runs the current generation.
I encourage you all to watch Euphoria and then analyze it–despite its controversy! Afterall, controversial things stir discussion.