HBO series "Euphoria": High Freaks

Of course, the title is pure mockery. For the last time she was really happy she was his mother's belly, the 17-year-old narrator Rue snarls at you in the first "Euphoria" moments. Happy, until "the cruel uterus" crushed them "and pressed them into life uninvited, three days before 9/11, thank you too.

In a scandal-ridden teletext scarcity, one could describe "Euphoria" as a sinister high school series in which there are plenty of rough sex and drug scenes. Pure hedonism, actually, but it never looks like it's fun here. "Seinfeld" is often said to be a "series about 'nothingness" - "Euphoria" fulfills this claim with zappendusterer beauty and in the form of eight iridescent schlieren episode bubbles, which one likes to watch for an hour at a time bursting. And then you do not really know then.

It's best to hang on to Rue Bennett, with a tactfully tired rip-off played by former Disney series clean girl Zendaya. Rue is back from the summer vacation drug rehabilitation to a suburb of Los Angeles and has no intention of staying clean.

What is to shock you?

As a child, she was diagnosed with all kinds of mental disorders. Her mother's attempt to wrap her diagnosis in glitter paper is one of the first few episodes of drama: "Many interesting, intelligent, funny, and creative people have the same problems as you: just take Vincent Van Gogh, Sylvia Plath, and your darling 'Britney Spears!' Because the pills do not help, Rue tries it with wild self-medication.

"Euphoria" has been heavily controversial in the US, it says in mumbling articles, because of all the indifferent snuffed drugs, the semi-explicitly shown sex. But if you've seen the movie "Kids," the series "Skins," or any of the other juvenile finery tales that have always existed as an alternative tally alongside the gossipy "Gossip Girl" series youth, this alleged shock potential is hard to understand. If you look at "Euphoria" as an adult, the prevailing feeling is more the relief that you are already tall.

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8 pictures

In the course of the first season, the masses of naked limbs counteract one another everywhere: fatpics on cell phones (Rue explains how to make the perfect snaps in an educational film), in leaked sextapes, and finally culminating in a locker room scene in which it wobbles from all corners below. 30 penises can be seen in this scene. The plan was actually 80, that was the station HBO, which broadcast the series in the US, but then too much.

Multidimensionally enlarged

The eternal tail is annoying, until you get it: It is just a figurative implementation of the sex world, as they experience the young female characters - completely dominated male, male fantasies and perspectives. Although there is a hopeful scene in which a boy actually stops choking on the girl during sex when she asks him to. Something like that already stands out as unexpected and positive, which is probably the saddest aspect of all.

Series newcomer Sam Levinson ("Assassination Nation") has written "Euphoria" as an adaptation of an Israeli series of the same name that plays in the '90s, and produced them together with rap superstar Drake, among others. Above all, he has succeeded in realigning well-known cliché figures from the standard cast of every high school drama.

In "Euphoria" you all meet again, only in many layers zoomed: The roaring male quarterback must bear since childhood, the disturbing and abusive double life of his father. The punky nerdgirl will not be redeemed this time, finally finding a cute boy, but making a career as a soft dominant online sex woman who exempts sugar daddys. The cheerleader suffers from the fact that she has become too used to letting others have her body - in one of her scenes, the song "My Body Is A Cage" by Arcade Fire plays in the background.

No one has to be the stronger one

The novelty at the school, an indispensable dramaturgy domino for this genre, is Trans-Girl Jules - who does not have to explain this, but is simply shown chasing a hormone injection into her thigh. Jules (Hunter Schafer) has a self-destructive predilection for older men, and it's a big plus in the series that she does not get the reasoning out of her trans background, but leans on her parents' breakup.

The repertoire of wobbly figures is thus far from exhausted, and occasionally all these explanatory emotional wounds are too much for eight-hour-olds. Because then also the story of Rue and Jules must be told, the touch plot that makes all the growing pains around it bearable. The two girls find each other and become allies, and the beautiful thing about this simply accepted, unspychologized friendship is that none of them has to be the stronger one.

The raw and the delicate, this balance does not always work in the first "Euphoria" season. Sometimes the series fuzzes, as if she herself was a teenager, easily distractible and trudelig. However, how much room she leaves to her figures is nice and special, despite the shortage of time left to her personal history. But the narrative leaves them their secrets. The deeper meaning of a tent-like, wine-red hoodie, in which Rue wraps itself again and again, is not understood until the end of the season.

"Euphoria" does not even try to pretend that even his characters understand it completely. Maybe it's the most respectful thing a high school series can do.

"Euphoria" . From 16.10., 8.15 pm available on Sky.