Last year I checked out the Euphoria pilot and lasted about twenty minutes. Admittedly, I watched it at a time where I was exhausted by anything that was even remotely political. And while Euphoria isn’t a political show, it touched on some hot-button topics that were politically-adjacent enough to turn me off. So I bailed.
But when The Bachelor let me down by having one of the worst seasons in memory, a TV slot opened up in my schedule. So I gave Euphoria a second chance, sans the baggage I brought into it the first time. Stripped of any preconceived notions, I experienced a show that wasn’t just good. It was groundbreaking.
I’ll get into the writing in a second. But just from a directing perspective, this show was amazing. To be fair, the show must have an ungodly budget. Because there isn’t a single scene where they give a master, then two over-the-shoulders, and call it a day, like your typical TV drama.
If you’ve got two characters in a room, you’re going to have a drifting overhead camera. You’re going to have a musical dance number. You’re going to have a dream sequence. You’re going to have an elaborate lighting setup that took 72 hours to prep. Even close-ups are never static. They’re always moving in some way.
It’s got to take them 10 times as long to shoot one two-person dialogue scene than it takes the average production. Which is why it feels special.
When it comes to the writing, Euphoria reinforced the magical formula for making any act of fiction work. Whether it’s a TV show, a movie, even a Youtube sketch, the thing you have to get right IS THE CHARACTERS. If you create complex interesting watchable characters, you can get away with anything.
The lead character is Rue, a 17 year old drug addict. While Rue can be passive, she’s fascinating in that she’s so self-destructive. Every time she clears a hurdle, she falls back down five sets of stairs. She’s also the narrator of the story, which allows the writers to jump around all the different storylines easily. I see a lot of writers make the mistake of jumping around chaotically and expecting the reader to be able to keep up. If you’re going to do that, do what Euphoria does. Put a narrator in there to explain where we’re jumping and what’s going on.
Next up we have Jules, who’s a 17 year-old transgender girl who’s just moved into town. Rue becomes infatuated with how unique and free Jules is, and the two become fast friends. An early scene also has Jules setting up and engaging in an intense sexual session with a 45 year old man. It instantly sets this tone that Euphoria is going to be different from your average TV show. It does things you’re not supposed to do.
Let me take a quick detour here because this is an important point: When everyone’s doing the same thing, ask what you, as a writer, can do that’s different. The Euphoria writers clearly sat down and said, in a world where every teenage show ever lies about what high school is really like, we’re going to be the lone truthful voice. We’re not going to sanitize anything. We’re going to show the messiness. We’re going to show the secrets, even if they’re uncomfortable. And we’re not going to pull any punches. That decision alone is what made the writing in Euphoria 10x as impactful as any other show being written right now.
Our main guy character is Nate Jacobs, high school QB and the son of the man who had sex with Jules. Nate, like his father, has some questions about his sexuality, which makes for a very tortured character. When you’re writing any character, one of the things you should be looking for is internal conflict – something that the character is battling within themselves. When you do that, the character is always in a place of struggle. And struggle is more interesting to watch than stability.
The show also has a host of a great secondary characters. There’s the overweight junior, Barbie, who struggles with her appearance until she runs across the option to cam online, and becomes a success at the expense of a lot of twisted middle-aged men. There’s Cassie, the hot girl, who has zero self-esteem and lets men run roughshod over her.
There’s one of my favorites, Fezco, Rue’s drug dealer, who deals from his convenience store with his 10 year old step-brother, Ashtray. I at first saw these two as a gimmick. I mean, come on. A 10 year old drug dealer? But the first episode of season 2 that goes into the backstory of how Fezco and Ashtray came to be, was my favorite episode of the series by far.
And then you have Cal Jabobs, Nate’s dad, the one who had sex with Jules. When Cal realizes that Jules runs in the same circles as his son, his life becomes one giant act of squirming. He’s constantly trying to avoid getting exposed. And that storyline is one of the more entertaining ones in the show.
Outside of the characters, the reason I like this show so much is that it takes chances. Even though those chances don’t always pay off. I remember one episode where Rue’s mom reads a letter in front of the church about what it’s like to have a daughter who’s a drug addict, and the writers try to pull a Scorsese where, during different parts of the letter voice over, we’re cutting to different characters in the story dealing with their own issues that don’t line up at all with the letter the mom is reading. I’m sorry but the excruciating pain you went through when your daughter was on life support has nothing to do with Maddy and Nate’s break-up.
But it hits a lot more than it misses. There’s a scene in the second season where Barbie (the overweight girl) is searching for help for her self-esteem issues online and instead of just cutting to comments or Youtube videos on a laptop screen, the writers physically bring the online personalities into Barbie’s room. And they’re all making their plea. They’re all telling her how to be more confident. And it was just creative, you know. That’s all we’re asking for as viewers. We want to see something familiar presented in a fresh way. Cause that freshness is what elevates your material above the stuff on the CW.
What’s great about this show is that it even gets the cheap stuff right. One of my favorite sequences is when Nate, who’s dating Maddy, brings Cassie into a bathroom at a party to have sex with her. Maddy realizes Nate (but not Cassie) is in the bathroom and starts banging on the door. There’s nowhere for Nate or Cassie to escape so they have to come up with a plan.
Nate has Cassie hide in the bathtub with the shower curtain drawn, and then goes out into the hall to placate Maddy. But Maddy needs to go the bathroom, so she blows by Nate and into the bathroom. Now Maddy is unknowingly in the bathroom with Cassie, who’s just had sex with her boyfriend.
When you create one of these situations, your job as a writer is MAKE THIS AS BAD AS POSSIBLE FOR YOUR CHARACTER. So that’s exactly what they do. When Maddy finishes and goes back into the hall (“Thank God,” we think! “Cassie is safe!”), another guy is waiting, and he asks Maddy if she wants to smoke a joint with him… you guessed it… back in the bathroom. She says yes, and now we’re right back in the bathroom with Cassie having to worry about two people instead of one.
I won’t get into the fine details of the scene but the writers add even more obstacles for Cassie to overcome, all of which are harrowing. It was such a simple scene. And yes, it was cheap. But it was captivating because the writing was so on-point.
I could go on about this show. The characters, the scene-writing, the risks it takes, the unpredictability of the narrative. It’s all great. And I have to give it to HBO because they are the Marvel of television. It’s them, and the next runner is 15 miles behind them. Whatever they’re doing over there needs to be researched and dissected because the quality they put out on a yearly basis is heads and tails above the competition.
Have any of you seen Euphoria? Curious to know what you like or dislike about it.
