Euphoria, Skins, and Growing up in the Golden Age of Television
The US Version of the acclaimed Channel 4 series, Skins, underwhelmingly premiered on MTV in January of 2011. The controversy generated among parents was immediate and staggering. To begin, the show depicted explicit sexual scenes between minors. Yes, some of the actors were actually minors. This was enough to end the show after only one season and 11 episodes.
Skins (UK) is another story altogether. While I don’t think I ever made it past the first 30 minutes of the US version, during the summer of 2011 I devoured 6 series (seasons, across the pond) in a little over a month. That was one of those summers when you’re too old to go to camp and too young to legally drive. So, I lived my life through Skins. I binged the show so quickly and so intensely that I began to feel as if I was apart of this world. And, in a way, I was. I was coming up on my last year of middle school and dreaming about all of the trouble I would get into in high school (turns out, not much, but I could still dream about it).
The show was groundbreaking in its format. While ensemble sitcoms reached popularity in the early 2000s (probably a product of the success of Friends), Skins was one of the first ensemble dramas. Every episode focused on one specific character, one specific point of view. This format never changed, even as changes to the ensemble were made. Every 2 series focus on a different group of teens entering some year of high school I will never understand but I think they call Uni? Sixth form? It’s all probably different now. The show’s aim, overall, is to provide a realistic depiction of 16-17 year olds living in Bristol. It succeeds overwhelmingly in its realism. These characters, as I recall, were the first real thing I ever encountered on television. It was for that reason that I was obsessed. I saw, for the first time, situations as they actually were: messy situations, messy relationships, messy family drama, messy everything. And the actors were actually doing what the characters were doing. At least, it always appeared that way (I sure hope they weren’t actually having sex or doing drugs in front of the camera).
Since Skins, it seems like everything I’ve ever made or seen aspires to that level of realism. Enter Euphoria. For whatever reason, this “hyper-realistic” show is one of those that I always resisted bingeing. I always felt like I had to be in some kind of “mood” to watch it. But now, as I’m slowly running out of truly great things to watch (though HBO is slowly rolling out some amazing material, I may add), I finally decided to give it a go. Euphoria follows that once groundbreaking Skins format that I mentioned earlier: each episode focuses on one character in the ensemble. Unlike Skins, however, it filters through each character’s timeline in an artful way. Each one of them has some sort of inciting trauma or backstory that informs the character’s entire perspective— all of this narrated by Rue, because there has to be a specific lens. Otherwise, the whole entity threatens to crumble. Like Skins, I find some characters that I know….
Rue: the drug-addled, no-shits-to-give girl who never quite got over her dad’s death a few years back.
Jules: the beautiful and blossoming trans girl who is slowly but surely coming into her own after living a dangerous life through the online BDSM scene.
Nate: the popular and overly-violent (to say the least) jock who’s very much in denial about his father’s lifelong kiddie porn addiction.
No, I didn’t really know people exactly like this in high school. But I feel like I did. I feel like these might have been my friends back then. Or maybe all of this is nostalgia for that time in my life when I was game for anything? When I wasn’t scared. Of everything. When I was hungry for an adventure, and I was hungry for one every night.
And now, as the pandemic SLOWLY dies down, I’m finding that I’m scared more than ever before. Scared to go out. Scared to be around people who aren’t my family. In the meantime, while I’m overcoming these fears, I have a ton of great art at my disposal. Thank g-d I live in the Golden Age of Television.
PS: I’ll also note here that 13 Reasons Why (the TV show) is a COMPLETE foil to these two shows mentioned above. Its depiction of life as an American teenager today is simply drama-seeking. I wish it was a soap opera, but it’s not quite that genre, and for that reason, I don’t even know if it deserves watching. That show in particular strikes me as one of those in which all of the writers tried to think of every single traumatic thing that could happen to a person and put it all into one season. Keep in mind, I was 12 or 13 when I read this book!!! It was appropriate then!!! Who is this show even for anyway?
