There’s no better way to achieve the right amount of conflict, chaos and out-there fashion choices than writing a show about teenagers. Ever since Grange Hill (1978) regularly shocked British audiences with storylines about teenage pregnancy and teacher-pupil relationships, high-school set shows have established a reputation for pushing boundaries.
I was only two when Skins (2007) first premiered on Channel 4, and thankfully, I waited until I was fourteen before I watched it. Was it a good idea at the time to measure myself up to Effie and Cassie? Of course not. But for all the fearmongering about Skins-themed parties, I think it’s safe to say that the show launched a million more badly executed smoky eyes than it did noise complaints. Launching the careers of Nicholas Hoult and Dev Patel, it zipped between lighthearted stories about connecting with old Russian women over Billy Joel and plot lines about parental death. It only pushed the bounds of reality at the end of the fourth season, with a murderous psychiatrist who came out of nowhere. Looking back on it now, it seems more like a show made for adults than for young people. While shows about teenagers might seem like an effort to appeal to a younger audience, it could also be an attempt for adults to relive their youth through TV.
Which brings me to Euphoria (2018). If Skins and Grange Hill pushed boundaries, then Euphoria seems intent on going much, much further. While visually stunning, the show never lets up on the graphic content, ramping up the stakes continuously. And what seems surprising now is the seriousness with which it was taken when it first came out. It’s a show that gives the sheen of excellence, with a stacked cast, gorgeous design and the prominent show runner name of Sam Levinson—but in retrospect, the actual storyline runs a little hollow, with the two previous series struggling to build to something substantive. The strength of Rue’s addiction story doesn’t make up for the increasingly demeaning demands placed on the other female characters. It’s important to note that while Channel 4 has a charter that commits it to producing quality alternative content—exemplified by the subversive nature of Skins—HBO is far more motivated by profit. There’s something really distasteful about the fact that the sometimes degrading depictions of teenagers exist to make the few rich executives richer.
The really classic storyline of a teen show tends to revolve around a relatively innocent teen discovering an illicit world of drugs and sex through new friendships—an adult world that’s both exciting and sometimes scary. But is that what an adult is really about? Pen15 (2020) takes a different approach. Set in the heady days of middle school, Pen15 focuses on the friendship between its two leads, with its adult writers, Anna Konkle and Maya Erskine, playing the 13-year-old versions of themselves. 13-year-olds are arguably as ill-informed and risk-taking as their 16-year-old counterparts. Yet Pen15 is pretty unique in picking them out as a subject. In the face of Pen15, Euphoria is a thin excuse to depict underage sex and drug taking and perhaps Pen15 illustrates what makes Skins a cult classic and Euphoria feel icky only five years on—that it’s very funny. Adolescence is objectively very funny. It’s easy to recall the dramatic, but chances are you spent a lot more of it laughing than crying
It is always difficult for very adult show-runners to properly remember what being young was really like, and probably even more difficult for studio executives to see past what may or may not make them any money. However, there’s something consequential about writing teenagers—it is the sum of who we are as adults, but younger and more stupid. With Pen15, Konkle and Erskine looked back with a lot of humility and humour to who they were at their worst—or who they were at 13—and came up with something meaningful and novel. While Euphoria masquerades as the shock of the new, it really builds on what is now quite an outdated trope of what being a teenager is like. The kids are alright, really.
Image by Anna Thetical on Openverse.