Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Euphoria’ On HBO, Where Zendaya Plays An Addict Trying To Chase Away Her Crippling Anxiety

If you have kids who are fans of the singer and Disney mainstay Zendaya, do not let them see HBO’s new YA drama Euphoria. This show, about a teenage girl who chases crippling mental illness by taking lots of drugs, is not for kids. Heck, it’s barely for adults. But it’s a show that’s pretty daring, if you can bear watching what it has to offer. Read on for more…

EUPHORIA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A graphic of a fetus floating around in her mother’s womb, about the be born.

The Gist: Rue Bennett (Zendaya) has always been an anxious kid, from the moment she was crushed against “the cruel cervix of my mother Leslie” (i.e., was born) a few days after 9/11, through the present day, when she’s a 17-year old high school junior (let’s just think she’s looking back on the past year, since she’d likely be a senior in 2019). In a montage of Rue’s childhood, she’s seen counting the squares in her dining room’s light fixture and crying when she gets interrupted, and passing out from a massive panic attack. To chase away the panic attacks that stop her breathing, heartbeat and even her brain, Rue takes a lot of drugs, from her mom’s Xanax to hallucinogens and cocaine.

She spends most of the summer before junior year in rehab after her little sister Gia (Storm Reid) finds her unconscious from an overdose. But gets out without any intention of staying clean, letting her buddy Frezco (Angus Cloud), who helps her get some LSD-like pills from the local 12-year-old drug dealer. When her mother Leslie (Nika King) wants to give her a drug test after an evening out, Rue runs through the possibilities to get around it in her mind, and decides to run to the house of her childhood friend Lexi Howard (Maude Apatow) and ask her for some clean pee.

In voice over, Rue also reminisces about meeting a new love named Jules Vaughn (Hunter Schafer), who lives with her clueless dad and has her own issues, namely meeting older men that she finds online and having violent sex with them. We see her meet one of those men (Eric Dane), who creepily talks about being with girls like her then more or less forces her to have anal sex.

They meet at a party at the house of Chris McKay (Algee Smith), who’s throwing a pre-school-year blowout with his buddy Nate Jacobs (Jacob Elordy), who’s still smarting from his breakup with Maddy Perez (Alexa Demie), who has sex in a pool with a random guy to make Nate jealous. In the meantime, Maddy’s nerdy friend Kat Hernandez (Barbie Ferreira), who befriended Jules in summer school, talks a big game in order to lose her virginity.

Our Take: Euphoria, created by Sam Levinson (The Wizard of Lies) based on an Israeli series, makes every other YA show that’s come before it, even the more “daring” ones we’ve seen on streaming and cable lately, look like those old ABC Afterschool Specials in comparison. In Rue Bennet, Levinson has created his first teenage antihero, who doesn’t even come close to being clean, because the alternative is a state of mind she hates even more. Rue’s crippling anxiety almost makes her drug use understandable, or it could just be the fact that Zendaya inhabits the troubled Rue so completely.

If you’re a fan of Zendaya’s work for Disney, and especially if your kids are fans of hers, Euphoria is a shocking departure, one that no kid under 17 should really watch. Zendaya is excellent, conveying Rue’s cynicism, resigned to a life of always being high or letting her brain get the better of her via her anxiety, OCD, and likely bipolar disorder. She does make some snide jokes about her situation, especially in voice over, but her performance is mostly maudlin, making us forget all about the character she played in kidcoms like K.C. Undercover only a few years ago.

The show is pretty well put together, with visual feasts popping up during segments where Rue describes her state of mind, or we see her crying glitter when she’s high on hallucinogens. But it’s definitely designed to make parents have their own panic attacks; as a parent to a preschooler, we certainly had one of our own. If teens are doing all of this drinking, drugs, and sex now, what are things going to look like in a decade? It’s scary to contemplate.

That being said, without Zendaya as Rue, and perhaps to a smaller extent Schafer as the deeply-pained Jules, the rest of the characters in Euphoria are standard-grade YA brats. If it weren’t for Rue’s presence, the show would likely just be painful for everyone to watch.

Sex and Skin: Lots of shots of sex on people’s phones, especially as McKay is shown what his new squeeze, Lexi’s older sister Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) is up to. He has sex with her and tries to choke her, thinking that, because he sees it in porn, that’s what all women like. We see a lot of penises, and we also see Jules topless as she waits for the creepy older guy to get naked and pound away.

Parting Shot: A surprise shot of Nate’s family, and we see Rue and Jules in bed. “I’ve got an idea,” Rue says. “Wanna get high?”

Sleeper Star: We definitely like Schafer as Jules and want to see if her relationship with Rue will make either or both of them better.

Most Pilot-y Line: As with Trinkets, we’re just tired of seeing stupid or detached parents in YA shows. Even Rue’s mom, who’s fairly tough on her, doesn’t even consider the fact that Rue could have obtained clean pee. Maybe it’s because she wants to believe. But Lexi and Cassie’s mom is constantly drunk and Jules’ dad has no idea what she does when she leaves the house. We get that teens do a lot their parents don’t know about, but we’d be happy to see a parent on a YA show that’s at least hip to maybe 10% of what their kids are doing outside the house.

Our Call: STREAM IT, mostly for Zendaya’s performance. Otherwise, Euphoria will likely make every parent who watches it hyperventilate. Maybe that’s on purpose, so they know how Rue feels.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream Euphoria on HBO