The Atlantic

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?
Source: HBO

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

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