There’s one scene from this season of “Euphoria” that sticks in my mind, and, somehow, it includes not even one close-up of a penis. It’s a conversation from the third and best episode, “Made You Look,” between Rue (Zendaya), the show’s emotionally and chemically unsteady narrator, and Jules (Hunter Schaefer), her closest companion and aspirational love interest.
Jules, who is transgender, is giddy over having made a date to meet Tyler, a boy from another high school whom she met on a gay dating app. Rue, lying next to her crush on a sunny stretch of grass, can’t quite process this information platonically, and instead bluntly questions the location of the proposed rendezvous — a lake on the edge of town.
Jules, accusing Rue of watching “way too much ‘Dateline,’” explains that Tyler’s mother is “super conservative,” and that he can’t risk being seen with a trans girl in public. But Rue isn’t having it.
RUE: Honestly, Jules, I don’t really care about the situation, because it just doesn’t seem safe.
JULES: I’ve been in situations that are way less safe.
RUE: OK, but that’s not really the point, right? The point is it’s dangerous.
JULES: Rue, this is the difference between, like, you and me. Like, I don’t always get the privilege of meeting people in front of a (expletive) audience or something.
On the subject of how people forge intimacy online, Jules’ observation — that what might seem like reckless or desperate behavior to some is merely the cost of living for others — is the show at its disarming best. “Euphoria,” which features a now famous defense of nude selfies as “the currency of love,” has a natural champion in Jules, who believes in the internet, for all its perils, as a force for good in her life.
But the vision of the web actually presented by the show over the course of the first season, which ends Sunday, is much darker. Last Sunday’s episode was the latest to suggest that, where teen internet usage is concerned, “Euphoria” more closely resembles the paranoid vision that Jules ascribes to Rue — a Very Special Episode of network news.
Take the storyline of Kat (Barbie Ferreira), a fellow student at the high school and one of the show’s strongest characters. Kat, like Jules, occupies an outer ring of her known social universe, having been bullied because of her weight from the time she was 11. Also like Jules, she turns to the internet — first as a writer of Tumblr fan fiction, then, after a sexual awakening, as a cam girl with a roster of submissive patrons — seeking the feelings of acceptance and self-confidence that haven’t been readily available to her elsewhere.
On “Euphoria,” the characters’ digital and physical lives are constantly swirling around one another, usually in a downward spiral that ends in alienation and self-loathing. When we first see Rue using a cellphone, she’s staring at a direct message from a person who has threatened to rape her. Cassie, the character who inspired the rant about nude selfies, has spent virtually the entire season in tears over hers.
These sorts of cautionary tales are unavoidable on a show that aspires to authentically portray the experiences of young women who exist online. And they heightened the creator Sam Levinson’s intense sensitivity to, and enduring fixation on, the premature loss of innocence. But Kat and Jules stand out because their digital lives allow us to glimpse a function of the internet — as a rich and generative lifeline to the isolated and vulnerable — that we’re less accustomed to seeing dramatized on cable television.
Which is why I was disappointed that, for both of them, the road of online experimentation leads — all too predictably — to ruin. After a few scenes of internet-borne sexual empowerment (one impeccably soundtracked to DMX’s “X Gon’ Give it to Ya”), Kat soon falls prey to lecherous predators, leaving it to a real boy from school to rescue her from digital debasement. And, as Rue suspected and the audience was forewarned, Jules’ lakeside rendezvous with Tyler (like a disturbing earlier hookup with a much older man whom she met on the same app) was destined for catastrophe.
When depicting teenagers engaged in risky behavior, it’s important to be realistic about the consequences. But there is more to online community than the hungry eyes of perverts and frauds (usually), and it’s surprising that a show that goes to such pains to wrap itself in the political and aesthetic banners of contemporary youth culture would adopt such a retrograde posture. A more compelling vision would better capture the fullness and complexity of internet relationships — the highs (the joy of finding your tribe, a date where no one wants to call the police), the lows and the awkward alike.
Instead, in the world that “Euphoria” has portrayed, young people who seek intimacy online find degradation and violence around seemingly every corner.
That’s not quite “Dateline,” but it’s pretty close.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.