Conceived by Levinson with pop star The Weeknd, aka Canadian musician Abel Tesfaye, it stars Tesfaye and another nepo baby Lily-Rose Depp, Johnny’s daughter with Vanessa Paradis. Called The Idol, it initially appeared to be similar fare to Euphoria. He now has a new show – and it was the most controversial drama of 2023 before anyone had seen a single episode. Yet there’s something about his Bret Easton Ellis approach to TV – high concept, beautifully created, drained of hope – that’s given him the reputation of LA’s most skilful teen whisperer. It didn’t matter that Levinson himself was a white thirtysomething heterosexual man and the son of hyper-successful Hollywood director Barry Levinson whose lived experience should, in theory, have chimed with almost no-one. Levinson writes and directs most episodes himself, citing Todd Hido’s dark photographs of suburbia, Danish film director Carl Dreyer and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights and Magnolia as inspiration for his stylized off kilter take on teenage life. It was watched by 19 million people in the US alone. The first episode of Euphoria’s second season, for instance, contains three penis shots, a drug-dealing grandmother, a girl shooting up in a car, a 12-year-old with face tattoos, sex in a bathroom, a near-overdose on opioids averted by snorting Adderall and a baby eating cigarette butts. The series expands to the students at East Highland High School in California grappling with sex, substances and social media in a show that blends the hyperreal drugs madness of Trainspotting with the tormented angst of Beverly Hills 90210. She meets and falls for Jules Vaughn, played by model Hunter Schafer, and does her moderately successful best to stay sober. For a generation born into nihilism, Sam Levinson’s vision of life proved so compelling it’s become HBO’s second most popular show in 20 years – after Game of Thrones.Īdapted from an Israeli series of the same name, Euphoria follows a young and jaded Rue Bennett, played by 26-year-old Zendaya Coleman, as she emerges from rehab and returns to high school. And, of course, devotion among its target audience. But The Wire and The Sopranos – even Game of Thrones – elicited nothing like this level of shock and awe. It’s not as if HBO enjoyed a reputation for family friendly dramas at the time. Parents thought the devil was crawling through the screen. Even thirtysomething journalists, barely 10 years older than the characters, found the show terrifying and incomprehensible (“HBO’s Euphoria Made Me Feel Old and Scared,” read one headline). To say it caused upset when it appeared on HBO back in 2019 is putting it mildly. The first episode of Sam Levinson’s blistering howl of a teen show Euphoria starts with the lead character – an addict named Rue – announcing she was born three days after 9/11 then hurls the viewer into what this generation has grown up with: terror, drugs, d- pics and nude selfies, social media, pornography, prescription opioids, gender fluidity and the lascivious attention of the older generation.
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