San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
HBO’s “Euphoria” series focuses on teenagers dealing with drugs, sex and other issues.
The chefs cooking up HBO’s new young adult drama “Euphoria” serve up plenty of serotonin bursts. Creator and lead writer Sam Levinson has thrown together a striking feast of visuals with a healthy bit of nuanced dialogue and storytelling. The show takes hits from David Fincher’s filmmaking dream pipe, modulating the director’s grimy moodiness down a touch while reinterpreting his clever camerawork to immerse viewers in both “Euphoria’s” druggedout phantasmagoria and the characters’ lucid experience of that world.
“Euphoria” follows the story of Rue (played by Oakland native Zendaya), a struggling addict and high school student who immediately backslides into substance abuse following her release from rehab. As she returns to her high school, she remembers how lonely and bizarre her world is and can see very little light beyond what’s right in front of her. She makes a new friend, a trans woman named Jules (Hunter Schafer), and they embark, together, on a road of friendship and sensation. Their story intertwines quite nicely with a number of other students in this young yet supremely talented cast, each trying to come to an understanding of themselves sexually, psychologically and in constructing their own identities.
The show’s technical verve — from its astonishing capture of teenage venery to the vivid druggie cinematography — stretch the show’s realism upward and outward. That realism extends even into the ways that the show conveys modern communication. “Euphoria” has cracked the text message code that felled shows like “House of Cards” or “The Mindy Project,” allowing for their young, relatively unknown stars to keep viewers immersed in its wild world.
“Euphoria’s” text technique is quite simple. For the most part, when characters like Rue, Jules or Kat hop on their phones, the show treats each message like normal captions or subtitles. The camera scans downward toward their fingers and pans upward to catch their reactions. The effect is twofold: Viewers are exposed to the breadth of the actors’ body performances, and the show is able to breeze through these moments, allowing texting to take as little time and effort in “Euphoria” as it does in real life.
In the second episode, Nate and his girlfriend, Maddy, are texting after a particularly wild party at a mutual friend’s home. While they are texting, the camera follows Maddy’s fingers, but as her jealous boyfriend shows himself to be vulnerable in message, the camera moves back to Maddy’s face as she begins to concoct a plan to fool him and the rest of the school. Maddy arches her eyebrows and cocks her head, as if to give real thought to the relatively light consequences of her lie. Flowing between the fingers and the faces invites viewers to delve into Maddy’s perspective as a character. If the camera sat behind Maddy or Nate as she’s texting, we wouldn’t have that kind of insight. If the messages showed up like blips on the screen, it would break our immersion in the show, perhaps keeping us from following that plot to its brutal end.
The design of these kinds of scenes also switch up based on who’s talking and what kind of platform is being used. There seems to be a conscious choice in “Euphoria” to situate the camera behind characters’ shoulders when they’re using social media. If a conversation is largely onesided, or, one character is talking at another, the camera adjusts to focus in on that character’s side of the conversation (such was the case with the aforementioned repartee between Maddy and Nate). We begin to get a sense of the nature of these characters, their struggles, fears and exuberance, and the quality of the relationships through the way texting is depicted.
In this regard, “Euphoria” is a master class in technical acumen, amplifying the relationship between two major characters. About a quarter of the way through the episode, a montage of faces, fingers and texts pulses behind a split screen, showcasing the remarkable similarities between Jules and Nate.
Jules doesn’t know it yet, but a man she meets on a dating app is actually one of her violent, transphobic classmates. The quiet scene carries on through their disillusioned days as their heads bow to talk to one another with the frequency of new love. As we watch the differences in their responses to each text — Jules usually with a winning smile, and Nate with an eerie smirk — the ominous doom of their meeting buzzes with every new message. It’s a cute, terrifying and clever scene that ends with the split dissolving between the two characters as they sit in the same classroom. The closeness of potential violence looms in the background.
That kind of thoughtfulness is invaluable for a show like “Euphoria” that must juggle the racy content with a realism that stops just short of pornographic or indulgent. Between the metacommentary of the nowinfamous locker room scene to the screaminducing “micropenis” camming scandal, the task for the show’s production team is quite a daunting one.
But the script, sound design and performances are rapturous, experiencing the real comedown only in important moments when the plot calls. If the show bungled the onscreen texting and communication, it would risk its greatest strength: its ability to submerse its audience in this weird world.
Quickly and quietly, “Euphoria’s”technical knowhow is the stuff of TVmaking dreams, empowering its story in a beautiful symbiosis that’s made it HBO’s latest success story.