EUPHORIA SEASON 1 FINALE EXPLAINED FULL
EUPHORIA SEASON 1 FINALE EXPLAINED TV

Rue didn’t plan to stay sober, but once she strikes up a friendship - and then romance - with new girl Jules ( Hunter Schafer), she gets clean again. The premise of Euphoria is as follows: 16-year-old Rue ( Zendaya) has just come home from rehab to attend her junior year of high school.

The more the show is about these ladies and the less it is about Nate, the better it is.

But it’s learned to veer away from those problems over time. Euphoria has a tendency to get a little bit Hot Topic. In other words, when Euphoria is really good, it’s a nouveau My-So Called Life with the potential to develop into a Buffy. But when it’s at its best, it’s an earnest and intimate teen drama that uses its sophisticated visual vocabulary to evoke the way adolescence feels, even if the lighting is never quite so good in real life. When Euphoria is soapy and salacious, it is the worst version of itself. In the season finale, “And Salt the Earth Behind You,” which aired August 4 on HBO, Euphoria finally revealed its true self. It’s gotten less shocking and much more sincere, less issues-driven and more character-focused.

EUPHORIA SEASON 1 FINALE EXPLAINED FULL

It was issues-driven, but in a silly, sensationalistic kind of way that felt calculated to shock: Here’s a teenage girl O.D.ing (because of the opioid crisis and Gen Z’s skyrocketing anxiety rates!) here are teen boys swapping nude photos of a classmate without her permission (because teens with their phones and their revenge porn!) here are teens having sex in a pool in front of a party full of people (because look how scandalous!).īut over the course of its eight-episode first season, Euphoria found its more thoughtful, honest heart. When HBO’s new teen show Euphoria premiered in June, it sort of felt like a combination of the Fosters template and the Riverdale template. Everything is just supposed to be sudsy and fun. There’s murders and love triangles and teenagers who constantly talk like world-weary 40-year-olds, and absolutely none of it is supposed to feel emotionally realistic or like a teaching moment. The Fosters has a school shooting episode and a trans rights arc and an abusive boyfriend arc and a bipolar arc, and it treats every last one of them with complete earnestness and a sincere desire to teach its teen viewers the correct way of responding to such issues.Īnd there’s the paradigm used by shows like 90210, The O.C., and Riverdale, where the volume on everything is just turned up to eleven. In a didactic, issues-driven show, like The Fosters or Degrassi, every episode makes an attempt to think through some new social problem that teens are facing.

The girl who everyone ignores turns invisible the girl whose mother wants to relive her high school glory days through her steals her body and when Buffy sleeps with her boyfriend, he does something worse than just disrespecting her the next morning: He turns evil and goes on a killing spree. The Buffy the Vampire Slayer template involves a layer of metaphor that turns the stakes of high school drama apocalyptic. When sophomore Angela Chase tells us in the pilot of My So-Called Life that she feels like she’ll die if she doesn’t start to hang out with the wild Rayanne Graff, it sounds absurd - but you also know exactly how she feels. There’s the My So-Called Life and the Freaks and Geeks route, which is all about recognizing how low-stakes and silly most high school drama is and treating it with empathy and gentleness regardless. And to do that work, teen shows tend to follow one of four basic templates. When that really works, it can feel like a therapeutic release to watch a great teen show.

EUPHORIA SEASON 1 FINALE EXPLAINED TV

That’s why teen TV shows can be so cathartic.Ī good teen show reenacts the worst parts of our lives, only it fills it with beautiful people and clever quips, and it takes all of the petty nonsense of high school as seriously as it felt at the time. You’re spending most of your waking hours in high school, a truly, truly terrible place to live. The episode of the week for August 4 through 10 is “ And Salt the Earth Behind You ,” the first season finale of HBO’s Euphoria.īeing a teenager is a traumatic experience. Every week, we pick a new episode of the week.

Euphoria season 1 finale explained