PREVIOUSLY WRONG: Euphoria S02E01

PREVIOUSLY WRONG: Euphoria S02E01

Fez, filters, and funk; why you should be watching Euphoria …It’s just heroin.
Jules and Rue in the dark in euphoria love
PHOTO CREDIT:

“Previously Wrong” takes us week by week through the unpredictable world of post-Golden Age television, the streaming age if you will. #PrevWrong aims to push the discussion for great TV while recommending series worth your watch lists. For this entry, Aaron Chan presents talking points for the wild premiere for the second season of HBO’s teen drama on steroids Euphoria. Oh right and also SPOILERS!!! 

 

"Trying to Get to Heaven Before They Close the Door"

DICK COUNT: THREE

 

For HBO’s Euphoria, the most stimulating show on television, the threat of danger will always be fuel.  

It’s what makes its characters more mortal than those on Riverdale or Pretty Little Lies; it's how addiction puts its characters in traumatically volatile situations. It’s what makes its primary antagonist so intimidating in his capability to ruin people’s lives. It makes every decision the characters make have potentially life-threatening outcomes. Even giving your number out to the wrong person will likely put you in the line of fire.

Set in an American high school in a city not yet disclosed, Euphoria delivers both the backstories and journeys for its characters, archetypes of those who exist in our world – the party girl, the drug dealer, the drug user, the cam girl… not only bringing understanding into the lives and predicaments of these people but also saying something about this era as a whole, itself dominated by the ideas and decisions of the youth. 

Carrying the soul of HBO high dramas like Six Feet Under that took on the edgiest subjects of the modern day with melodrama, humour, and intensity, its ethos is no different; the show’s flaws are to be embraced to allow for its hyperrealism to occur on screen, in turn teaching us things about the actual reality we go out and live in. 

The show’s producers are a brain trust of some of the most influential creatives currently, creator Sam Levinson, A24, Drake and his business partner Adel “Future” Nur, and Zendaya who also stars and narrates the series. As the female lead in Spiderman: No Way Home which currently runs in theatres and just beat out Titanic for domestic box office gross, Zendaya’s rising star continues to be a huge benefit to the show’s it factor. 

What often is brought up as Euphoria’s largest deterrent happens to be its most crucial element – excess: its augmented visual style and subject matter renders every episode like the climaxes of other shows. Its explosion of colour, music, and camera filters may offend the untrained eye, the same way its boundless view of Gen Z is sure to provoke all parties, its teenaged characters in the nude will enrage parents and feminists, or how its sporadic bouts of graphic violence will surely be viewed as gratuitous. Massive amounts of illicit drugs consumed casually by characters of age to receive homework assignments is nearly impossible to not stare at, while much larger wholesale amounts sliding along dirty coffee tables often creates situations that put the show in its highest gear. 

But for a series about young people made by young people made for young people in 2022, this is the only logical way of presenting its story. Euphoria nails how we consume media and content with the constant provocation that demands our attention and overstimulation through visual and auditory means. Everything in our world from social media to concerts to music videos to corporate advertising looks like what this show looks like through its oversaturation of colours and flashing lights. 

As with most HBO successes, an order for a second season normally equates to a serious level up in budget; better writers with stronger pen games and better ideas, better actors in smaller parts, more quality sets and exotic locations, among many other noticeable improvements. Euphoria S02 is no exception. Set during New Year’s Eve, we open with a drug deal that becomes a sweep for informants in the episode’s first twenty minutes. We meet Faye, the prostitute who has tagged along and shoots heroin in her inner thigh. Rue, Fez, his partner, Faye and all other parties are asked to strip down to prove they aren’t carrying a wire in a bid to take over slain drug wholesaler Mouse’s connect. The level of intensity is kept at this dial for practically the entire episode. 

 

 

Then, the crew who just survived what could have turned into a massacre, arrive at a house party bigger than anything we’ve seen in S01: far more people (extras), a far bigger property, and more steady cams & flashing light effects. Euphoria’s music budget also received a huge bump running the gamut between 70s soul that defines flashbacks, yacht rock which eerily soundtracks the drug den, and a nonstop barrage of party tracks. With Euphoria treating 2000s and 90s rap like Entourage treated classic rock, one can’t help but think that HBO’s market research team knows exactly the kind of music that has been turning on the TikTok generation. The rarity of a moment without some kind of music leaves silences feeling like hammer blows. 

With the core characters set up, the crossing of their paths promises to have engaging results – we are rewarded with the unexpected chemistry between Fez and Lexi, more development between Kat and Jules, and of course the terrifically shocking final moment where Fez who had likely been waiting all night despite coolly socializing past midnight, lays out Nate, practically conducting a full remodel of his face. 

Where Euphoria’s writers fail is in their impulsivity to force these dynamics. Nate and Cassie are brought together in the front half surely to impose maximum carnage on both characters, perhaps the show’s most unstable in a murderer’s row of unstable characters. This promises to be one of the most important trajectories of this season, but how should anyone be convinced this relationship would ever exist under reasonable circumstances after a single interaction? We’ve seen them together once before, at the Chili Cookoff (don’t fuck with me HBO), where Nate insulted both her and McKay, hinting at his then-girlfriend’s liberal past. Are we to believe that she’s now infatuated with the guy and removes her panties because he put on an Orville Peck song, gave her half an open beer, and put his foot on the gas? Was McKay really written out because Cassie tells him she’s not a good person? Hasn’t she said this before? Are we seriously not going to mention where this guy was when she was in the waiting room to get her Shmas-Shmors-Shman? 

Perhaps even more egregious is the inconsistency of Maddy who will surely need to be redeemed to maximize the damage that Nate and Cassie’s relationship will incur. In S01 she was introduced as troubled and materialistic, promiscuous and reckless, but for her character to be properly redeemed as strong or even thoughtful, it must be through narration or observed acts of kindness. Here, she’s re-entered the show as a different person, wiser, more reserved, (and with sideburns) leaving us confused as to where the explosive fire cat who idolized Sharon Stone in Casino had gone.

Fez on the other hand, who tested far better than anyone could have imagined in the show’s first season is given ample time to shine here and the most riveting opening montage we’ve seen yet. Euphoria’s back stories that open its episodes (always qualifying as a highlight) don’t just grab hold of you by exposing the roots of its characters, but also foreshadow important actions they make. Fez is shown as hanging on every word of advice his Grandma gives him, even referring to his McDonalds-addicted Uncle a decade later in his conversation with Lexi. Her word has proven correct, her lesson that no adult would ever pat down a ten year old comes up correct during the bitched drug deal and when Rue asks if he had ever known a successful female dealer, he responds after careful consideration, “one.” Under the instruction of his supplier grandma, his only teacher, Fez by the end of the episode uses violence to protect the people he loves, but by going after Nate, the primary threat of the series, he will almost certainly have to use violence for his own survival. 

But the main attraction of the show will always be consumed by the fate of Rue and Jules, a relationship more sophisticated than what we deserve from a teen drama. Jules feels she herself is not adequate to be the security blanket that Rue needs to be free from drugs; Rue must trust herself to allow herself to be with Jules, something she cannot do until she is clean. It’s a testament to how affectively the show has portrayed their love in how invested we are in these two characters who must fight for things greater than their own relationship to be together…and for now they finally are.

8/10 

 

<blockquote class="instagram-media" data-instgrm-captioned data-instgrm-permalink="https://www.instagram.com/tv/CYiR3JzIiSQ/?utm_source=ig_embed&amp;utm_campaign=loading" data-instgrm-version="14" style=" background:#FFF; border:0; border-radius:3px; box-shadow:0 0 1px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.5),0 1px 10px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.15); margin: 1px; max-width:540px; min-width:326px; padding:0; width:99.375%; width:-webkit-calc(100% - 2px); width:calc(100% - 2px);"><div style="padding:16px;"> <a href="https://www.instagram.com/tv/CYiR3JzIiSQ/?utm_source=ig_embed&amp;utm_campaign=loading" style=" background:#FFFFFF; line-height:0; padding:0 0; text-align:center; text-decoration:none; width:100%;" target="_blank"> <div style=" display: flex; flex-direction: row; align-items: center;"> <div style="background-color: #F4F4F4; border-radius: 50%; flex-grow: 0; height: 40px; margin-right: 14px; width: 40px;"></div> <div style="display: flex; flex-direction: column; flex-grow: 1; justify-content: center;"> <div style=" background-color: #F4F4F4; 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MEANWHILE: 

  • Kathrine Narducci’s stock has rightfully gone up from The Irishman and the pandemic-induced Sopranos resurgence and she does great work here fully realizing Fez’s OG grandmother watchdog in a fast five minutes, surely to never be seen again in the series. Microwaving phones, sailor’s dialect, chewing gum, with a baby in the sink, and most notably shooting Fez’s dad on each leg creating markers that centre his rung out penis; it’s maximum character efficiency.
  • But are we going to open every episode with a backstory? I thought this was just a S01 thing… if this show goes to IV and surely will with both Drake and A24 forking over cash and Zendaya’s star steadily rising, who are we going to be briefed about by the finale? Rue’s mom? McKay’s Dad? Mouse’s nose-less crony? The fucking janitor? I sound pissed but really im all for this.
  • It is unclear who contributed more to Bobby Womack’s career, Euphoria or Gorillaz’ Plastic Beach album and tour. Either way glad to have you Bobby.

 

 

  • Yo was that fucking Win Butler from Arcade Fire with the semi-automatic at the drug money counting table at the den? I mean he was wearing a headband and a basketball jersey and everything. HBO is coming out swinging with these indie cameos. How long until we get King Krule blowing cocaine into Tame Impala’s butt crack? And I thought my body was a cage… 
  • If I can pick one nit, aren’t we supposed to be scared of Mouse? He was intimidating as fuck in every scene he was in and we’re to believe that the tiny boy ran up on him and struck him with the hammer? That’s how my boy Mouse goes down? Bro, HBO seriously how many shows you gonna deux ex machina your character arcs by just saying, “yo the kid ran up on the Night King when he wasn’t looking.” I  guess there can only be one kingpin in this show.. Queenpin? 

WHO WON THE EPISODE

Fez’s PALACE Underwear

And Fez for that matter

Maddy’s Sideburns

Like the corner of an expensive pillow

Orville Peck

That song is so god damn old

Travis’s Pickup Lines

I would want to shake your hand, but I don’t want to get hepatitis.
"
"
-

WHO WON THE EPISODE

Fez’s PALACE Underwear

And Fez for that matter

Maddy’s Sideburns

Like the corner of an expensive pillow

Orville Peck

That song is so god damn old

Travis’s Pickup Lines

I would want to shake your hand, but I don’t want to get hepatitis.
"
"
-

WHO WON THE EPISODE

Fez’s PALACE Underwear

And Fez for that matter

Maddy’s Sideburns

Like the corner of an expensive pillow

Orville Peck

That song is so god damn old

Travis’s Pickup Lines

I would want to shake your hand, but I don’t want to get hepatitis.
"
"
-

“Previously Wrong” takes us week by week through the unpredictable world of post-Golden Age television, the streaming age if you will. #PrevWrong aims to push the discussion for great TV while recommending series worth your watch lists. For this entry, Aaron Chan presents talking points for the wild premiere for the second season of HBO’s teen drama on steroids Euphoria. Oh right and also SPOILERS!!! 

 

"Trying to Get to Heaven Before They Close the Door"

DICK COUNT: THREE

 

For HBO’s Euphoria, the most stimulating show on television, the threat of danger will always be fuel.  

It’s what makes its characters more mortal than those on Riverdale or Pretty Little Lies; it's how addiction puts its characters in traumatically volatile situations. It’s what makes its primary antagonist so intimidating in his capability to ruin people’s lives. It makes every decision the characters make have potentially life-threatening outcomes. Even giving your number out to the wrong person will likely put you in the line of fire.

Set in an American high school in a city not yet disclosed, Euphoria delivers both the backstories and journeys for its characters, archetypes of those who exist in our world – the party girl, the drug dealer, the drug user, the cam girl… not only bringing understanding into the lives and predicaments of these people but also saying something about this era as a whole, itself dominated by the ideas and decisions of the youth. 

Carrying the soul of HBO high dramas like Six Feet Under that took on the edgiest subjects of the modern day with melodrama, humour, and intensity, its ethos is no different; the show’s flaws are to be embraced to allow for its hyperrealism to occur on screen, in turn teaching us things about the actual reality we go out and live in. 

The show’s producers are a brain trust of some of the most influential creatives currently, creator Sam Levinson, A24, Drake and his business partner Adel “Future” Nur, and Zendaya who also stars and narrates the series. As the female lead in Spiderman: No Way Home which currently runs in theatres and just beat out Titanic for domestic box office gross, Zendaya’s rising star continues to be a huge benefit to the show’s it factor. 

What often is brought up as Euphoria’s largest deterrent happens to be its most crucial element – excess: its augmented visual style and subject matter renders every episode like the climaxes of other shows. Its explosion of colour, music, and camera filters may offend the untrained eye, the same way its boundless view of Gen Z is sure to provoke all parties, its teenaged characters in the nude will enrage parents and feminists, or how its sporadic bouts of graphic violence will surely be viewed as gratuitous. Massive amounts of illicit drugs consumed casually by characters of age to receive homework assignments is nearly impossible to not stare at, while much larger wholesale amounts sliding along dirty coffee tables often creates situations that put the show in its highest gear. 

But for a series about young people made by young people made for young people in 2022, this is the only logical way of presenting its story. Euphoria nails how we consume media and content with the constant provocation that demands our attention and overstimulation through visual and auditory means. Everything in our world from social media to concerts to music videos to corporate advertising looks like what this show looks like through its oversaturation of colours and flashing lights. 

As with most HBO successes, an order for a second season normally equates to a serious level up in budget; better writers with stronger pen games and better ideas, better actors in smaller parts, more quality sets and exotic locations, among many other noticeable improvements. Euphoria S02 is no exception. Set during New Year’s Eve, we open with a drug deal that becomes a sweep for informants in the episode’s first twenty minutes. We meet Faye, the prostitute who has tagged along and shoots heroin in her inner thigh. Rue, Fez, his partner, Faye and all other parties are asked to strip down to prove they aren’t carrying a wire in a bid to take over slain drug wholesaler Mouse’s connect. The level of intensity is kept at this dial for practically the entire episode. 

 

 

Then, the crew who just survived what could have turned into a massacre, arrive at a house party bigger than anything we’ve seen in S01: far more people (extras), a far bigger property, and more steady cams & flashing light effects. Euphoria’s music budget also received a huge bump running the gamut between 70s soul that defines flashbacks, yacht rock which eerily soundtracks the drug den, and a nonstop barrage of party tracks. With Euphoria treating 2000s and 90s rap like Entourage treated classic rock, one can’t help but think that HBO’s market research team knows exactly the kind of music that has been turning on the TikTok generation. The rarity of a moment without some kind of music leaves silences feeling like hammer blows. 

With the core characters set up, the crossing of their paths promises to have engaging results – we are rewarded with the unexpected chemistry between Fez and Lexi, more development between Kat and Jules, and of course the terrifically shocking final moment where Fez who had likely been waiting all night despite coolly socializing past midnight, lays out Nate, practically conducting a full remodel of his face. 

Where Euphoria’s writers fail is in their impulsivity to force these dynamics. Nate and Cassie are brought together in the front half surely to impose maximum carnage on both characters, perhaps the show’s most unstable in a murderer’s row of unstable characters. This promises to be one of the most important trajectories of this season, but how should anyone be convinced this relationship would ever exist under reasonable circumstances after a single interaction? We’ve seen them together once before, at the Chili Cookoff (don’t fuck with me HBO), where Nate insulted both her and McKay, hinting at his then-girlfriend’s liberal past. Are we to believe that she’s now infatuated with the guy and removes her panties because he put on an Orville Peck song, gave her half an open beer, and put his foot on the gas? Was McKay really written out because Cassie tells him she’s not a good person? Hasn’t she said this before? Are we seriously not going to mention where this guy was when she was in the waiting room to get her Shmas-Shmors-Shman? 

Perhaps even more egregious is the inconsistency of Maddy who will surely need to be redeemed to maximize the damage that Nate and Cassie’s relationship will incur. In S01 she was introduced as troubled and materialistic, promiscuous and reckless, but for her character to be properly redeemed as strong or even thoughtful, it must be through narration or observed acts of kindness. Here, she’s re-entered the show as a different person, wiser, more reserved, (and with sideburns) leaving us confused as to where the explosive fire cat who idolized Sharon Stone in Casino had gone.

Fez on the other hand, who tested far better than anyone could have imagined in the show’s first season is given ample time to shine here and the most riveting opening montage we’ve seen yet. Euphoria’s back stories that open its episodes (always qualifying as a highlight) don’t just grab hold of you by exposing the roots of its characters, but also foreshadow important actions they make. Fez is shown as hanging on every word of advice his Grandma gives him, even referring to his McDonalds-addicted Uncle a decade later in his conversation with Lexi. Her word has proven correct, her lesson that no adult would ever pat down a ten year old comes up correct during the bitched drug deal and when Rue asks if he had ever known a successful female dealer, he responds after careful consideration, “one.” Under the instruction of his supplier grandma, his only teacher, Fez by the end of the episode uses violence to protect the people he loves, but by going after Nate, the primary threat of the series, he will almost certainly have to use violence for his own survival. 

But the main attraction of the show will always be consumed by the fate of Rue and Jules, a relationship more sophisticated than what we deserve from a teen drama. Jules feels she herself is not adequate to be the security blanket that Rue needs to be free from drugs; Rue must trust herself to allow herself to be with Jules, something she cannot do until she is clean. It’s a testament to how affectively the show has portrayed their love in how invested we are in these two characters who must fight for things greater than their own relationship to be together…and for now they finally are.

8/10 

 

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MEANWHILE: 

  • Kathrine Narducci’s stock has rightfully gone up from The Irishman and the pandemic-induced Sopranos resurgence and she does great work here fully realizing Fez’s OG grandmother watchdog in a fast five minutes, surely to never be seen again in the series. Microwaving phones, sailor’s dialect, chewing gum, with a baby in the sink, and most notably shooting Fez’s dad on each leg creating markers that centre his rung out penis; it’s maximum character efficiency.
  • But are we going to open every episode with a backstory? I thought this was just a S01 thing… if this show goes to IV and surely will with both Drake and A24 forking over cash and Zendaya’s star steadily rising, who are we going to be briefed about by the finale? Rue’s mom? McKay’s Dad? Mouse’s nose-less crony? The fucking janitor? I sound pissed but really im all for this.
  • It is unclear who contributed more to Bobby Womack’s career, Euphoria or Gorillaz’ Plastic Beach album and tour. Either way glad to have you Bobby.

 

 

  • Yo was that fucking Win Butler from Arcade Fire with the semi-automatic at the drug money counting table at the den? I mean he was wearing a headband and a basketball jersey and everything. HBO is coming out swinging with these indie cameos. How long until we get King Krule blowing cocaine into Tame Impala’s butt crack? And I thought my body was a cage… 
  • If I can pick one nit, aren’t we supposed to be scared of Mouse? He was intimidating as fuck in every scene he was in and we’re to believe that the tiny boy ran up on him and struck him with the hammer? That’s how my boy Mouse goes down? Bro, HBO seriously how many shows you gonna deux ex machina your character arcs by just saying, “yo the kid ran up on the Night King when he wasn’t looking.” I  guess there can only be one kingpin in this show.. Queenpin? 

WHO WON THE EPISODE

Fez’s PALACE Underwear

And Fez for that matter

Maddy’s Sideburns

Like the corner of an expensive pillow

Orville Peck

That song is so god damn old

Travis’s Pickup Lines

I would want to shake your hand, but I don’t want to get hepatitis.
-

WHO WON THE EPISODE

Fez’s PALACE Underwear

And Fez for that matter

Maddy’s Sideburns

Like the corner of an expensive pillow

Orville Peck

That song is so god damn old

Travis’s Pickup Lines

I would want to shake your hand, but I don’t want to get hepatitis.
-

WHO WON THE EPISODE

Fez’s PALACE Underwear

And Fez for that matter

Maddy’s Sideburns

Like the corner of an expensive pillow

Orville Peck

That song is so god damn old

Travis’s Pickup Lines

I would want to shake your hand, but I don’t want to get hepatitis.
-

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