Zendaya's First Euphoria Episode on HBO Was an Absolutely Wild Ride

hair, face, beauty, hairstyle, light, head, cheek, long hair, lip, lighting, — (Image credit: HBO)

Less than a month after the series finale of one its most popular shows, HBO has once again drawn in viewers with the season premiere of Euphoria, the Drake and Zendaya television collaboration that follows the complicated lives of suburban high schoolers. Despite the series of trippy promo shots and trailers, audiences really had no idea exactly what we were getting into—all we were promised were teenage drug abuse and copious amounts of full-frontal male nudity, which sounded...different, even by HBO's no-holds-barred standards.

The pilot episode of Euphoria aired last night, and I have to say that, brilliant as it was, it was a lot. Those trigger warnings? Totally necessary. We were introduced to Rue, a not-so-recovering teenage drug addict five days fresh out of rehab, and the other kids at her high school. Rue, played by Zendaya, has a complicated background that likely contributed to her dependency on drugs; she was born just days after 9/11, she received an early diagnosis of attention deficit disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, and anxiety disorder, and her father died when she was only a kid. Rue has lived a hard life, to say the least. To cope with her pain, the teen turns to any and every drug that has every existed, and I mean every single drug. Even the hard stuff.

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As a millennial who's inching closer to 30 by the day (*screams into the void*), I'm very far removed from the high school experience; I graduated from high school in 2011 and haven't looked back since. But what I do remember from my days of AP English and minimal school spirit looked nothing like what Rue and her classmates are going through on this show. Drugs? No ma'am. Sex? We didn't know her. Hookup apps where? We barely had just gotten access to Facebook!

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