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Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:01 Uh,
Speaker 1 00:00:08 When the second season of euphoria and American teen drama on HBO, max begin releasing weekly episodes on January 9th, 2022. It took the world by storm every week. The show trends on Twitter and other social media platforms as young people everywhere, tune in to see what happened to their most loved and hated characters. In fact, the first episode of season two, garnered 2.4 million viewers on just its first day of release. But what exactly is it about euphoria that draws in so much attention, the show centers through a high schooler, dealing with addiction, it's leading characters, grapple with substance abuse, sexuality, finding their identity and more euphoria gained notoriety for dealing with this dark subject matter, especially considering how young these characters are supposed to be. It's loved for its highly stylistic portrayal of high school life with its over the top makeup and style choices going viral among teenagers.
Speaker 1 00:01:04 It's cast members consisting of bonafide stars, Zendaya as well as first-time actors have skyrocketed to fame and become modern cultural icons with its 90% audience rating on rotten tomatoes and high viewership. The show has clearly struck a chord with much of the public, but that begs the question is this hyperbolic representation of the teenage experience bringing more harm than good are it's charming aesthetics and beloved actors leading to the normalization or even romanticization of these grim topics. While a lot of the grounded covers such as addiction are very real and prominent issues that young people face many believe that the extent to which you for you as characters deal with these problems is highly exaggerated to a detrimental extent. Madison Smith, a junior and muddle who recently started watching euphoria after hearing about all its hype shared her thoughts.
Speaker 2 00:01:57 I think that like their portrayal of it is super unrealistic. Um, a lot of the problems are just are like very exaggerated. My, my main thing that every time I talked to someone about why I don't like you for yet is specifically reus plot line ruse plot plotline is realistic. It is something that happens. Kids are addicted to drugs and almost die because they are on drugs. Like that is something that happens. And when you put that plot line next to all of these other plot lines that are so exaggerated, it just makes it seem unrealistic by associate's
Speaker 1 00:02:43 In response to these criticisms, which the show has been facing since the release of its first season showrunner, Sam Levinson said in a 2019 interview with entertainment weekly quote, I was just trying to capture the kind of heightened sense of emotion when you're young and how relationships feel unquote. And I just wrote myself as a teenager and what I was going through when I was younger and I was dealing with addiction and quote euphoria has also faced back its depictions of nudity and the objectification of teenage characters that cast consists of actors in their mid to late twenties and Alexa dummy playing 17 year old Maddie Perez, who is a whopping 14 years older than her character at age 31. As he, as adults play out the raunchy scenarios, their characters find themselves in. There's a question of the ethics behind depicting miners in this way. Additionally, much of this lewd contact presents itself in scenarios that are very violent towards the female characters. As we see young girls on a screen go through harrowing experiences through a potentially glamorizing lens Smith shared her opinions on this.
Speaker 2 00:03:46 Yeah. Like a few things about that one. Why is the violence against women in this show? So agregious, it's so gorgeous and so unnecessary. And again, like, it's fine because the actors are older. This is portraying high schoolers. Like it is so horrible to watch high schoolers go through this, but to have it painted again in this glamorous way, like it's so violent, it's so violent. But I feel like they're really trying to make it like obvious how violent it is to be like, this is not okay. But just because of like the way that the show is taught and the way the show looks, it just still makes it look. Whoever is
Speaker 1 00:04:23 While it has some incredible performances, high production value and makes for great quality television. Euphoria is rise to becoming a core facet of pop culture today. Whereas as many questions about the effects its content could have on its audience, if you would like to make a judgment on this topic for yourself, euphoria can be streamed on HBO max with new episodes coming out every Sunday at 8:00 PM CST, this was signing off.
