What Euphoria‘s Grimdark Aesthetic Says About the Evolution of Teen Dramas
Photo Courtesy of HBO
I hope Euphoria never ends. Between teenage girls becoming internet famous by writing viral Larry Stylinson fanfiction on Tumblr or swallowing goldfish and slicing their arms in the middle of house parties, the extent to which the controversial HBO series manages to accurately capture and exaggerate the strange happenings and milestones scribbled down in one’s own teenage diary is dumbfounding.
Led by a cast more attractive, deviant and drug-fueled than the peers you likely grew up with, the show indulges in the wicked deviancies of young adulthood that Freeform, MTV, Teen Nick or any other teen-marketed network have been unable to depict in an explicit and, uh, FCC-compliant manner: that is, crippling drug addictions, overdoses, child pornography, self-injury, camming, child institutionalization, severe mental illness and warped romantic power dynamics.
Euphoria is the latest installment in the sudden boom of darker content that has overtaken the teen genre: shows tackling grislier, macabre or convoluted themes and stylized with saturated colors or dark, high-contrast lighting to exaggerate mystery or melodrama. It’s a strange grimdark movement spearheaded by the likes of The CW’s pulpy soap Riverdale, Netflix’s damned shock-horror 13 Reasons Why and even Freeform’s Pretty Little Liars.
You’d have to be living under a rock to miss this evolution occurring in the Teen Drama—the sudden shift from campy, wonky shows centered around Laney Boggs-types embarrassing themselves in front of cute boys to Lynchian, hellish dramas about racy and sedated teenagers poisoning their parents, manipulating their peers and succumbing to biker gangs.
The genre’s longstanding cookie-cutter codes and conventions—relying on stereotypes, familiar, teen-specific locales and boy-meets-Mary-Sue narrative structures—have gone by the wayside to make room for candid and unembellished storytelling, marking the first time in a long time that teen-marketed content has taken on a new identity. But how the hell did teen content get so dark?
Teen-focused films and TV shows often move in phases. The ‘80s, ‘90s and early ‘00s saw a big boom in the teen genre, lasting somewhere between Sixteen Candles and Mean Girls. As explained in Charlie Lyne’s visual essay Beyond Clueless, most teen dramas made during that period were cut from the same fabric: straight white male or female protagonists tortured by something unique to adolescence (sexuality, fitting in, overbearing parents—the “I’m not giving up my dream, I’m giving up yours” mentality), banked on montages of incredible house parties, makeout sessions, school dances and proms, written with some evident moral message behind them.
As the genre became more of a cash-grab curio in the ‘00s, studios focused on pumping out campier romantic comedies and dramas (Bubble Boy, Slap Her…She’s French!) before shifting towards pimping out the teenage condition and mass-producing rich-kid dramas (Gossip Girl, The O.C., 90210). The most recent of short-lived phases was the wave of dystopian content that hit the genre after the success of The Hunger Games in the early ‘10s; you can likely recall the three-year period during which you were unable to sit through movie previews without watching teen heartthrobs jump over, like, rocks and asteroids in futuristic locales.