Last week and this week I'm featuring TV episodes that have been nominated for 2021 WGA awards.
Okay so today is a bit of a cheat. I haven't finished the first season of EUPHORIA yet, so rather than talk about creator/writer Sam Levinson's WGA-nominated episode "Rue", I want to talk about a writing technique the series uses repeatedly and very effectively: Hiding in the Sunlight.
A log line for the show: "After OD'ing and spending a summer in rehab, high school student RUE tries to get away with continuing to do drugs while also falling in love with new transgender student JULES, who gets off on having semi-violent sex with straight men in committed relationships."
It's not a perfect log line, but it does capture one key element on the show: this is the story of hurting teenagers in tough situations. They're like the traumatized teens from LEFTOVERS, except their inciting incident is not the Rapture but the horror of living.
Except most of the time the show doesn't feel that way. As narrator and protagonist, Rue is endlessly charming and wise, personal and funny. "I was once happy, content," she says at the beginning, over a shot of a fetus sleeping in a womb, "sloshing around in my own private primordial pool.
"Then one day, for reasons beyond my control, I was repeatedly crushed, over and over by the cruel cervix of my mother Leslie. I put up a good fight, but I lost. For the first time but not the last."
There's real darkness in that narration. But it's also such an unusual point of view to bring to the act of being born, and actress Zendaya's delivery is so rich and in a sense wry, that instead of registering primarily as dark it lands more as interesting and creative. You immediately love this character and want to hear more how she sees life.
Levinson also makes the unusual choice to use a first person narration as a third person omniscient. Each episode begins with Rue telling the story of one of her classmates, and always from a position of care and good will. She's like a benevolent god figure looking gently down on her peers, even as she's also a character in the story.
As a result of all this, our starting point with Rue is usually not worry but delight. She's still an addict, using and lying and eventually being abusive to others. But the "shadow" of her brilliance stretches so far, when things start to go dark for her, like when she's suddenly shouting outside her dealer's house in 103, or berating the old friend she's been using to get clean urine, we don't see it coming.
It's all been right there staring us in the face from the start--again, Rue's fundamental image of being born is about being crushed. But she's just so damn charming and amazing, that's not what we immediately register.
Jules is much the same. In the pilot she's having sex with a middle aged man who seems scary and violent. In 104 we'll get her backstory, and discover it's got even more pain in it than Rue's.
And yet as a character Jules behaves like her look, playful and effervescent, a fairie version of Claire Danes. She even dresses like ROMEO + JULIET Claire Danes.
At the end of the pilot she'll cut herself with a kitchen knife in front of a crowded room to scare off the nightmarish Nate, then charmingly introduce herself to the room and leave. Once again, the trauma of the character, the dangerous trajectory she's on, is all right there from the start. But Jules' beauty as a person eclipses it all. She's the person you wish you had as a best friend, not a cutter who hates herself. Except She Is.
As writers we're often weighing what information to share when. Every story wants its Big Reveals.
But EUPHORIA shows how the exact opposite can also be effective: You can show the audience everything up front (or a lot anyway), and if it's packaged in characters who are so wonderful, so sweet with each other, we may easily become too busy loving them, basking in the light of their presence, to notice the darkness within.
Why is the show called EUPHORIA? Not because the characters live in a hopeful fog, that's for sure. No, "euphoria" is what they (and Levinson) create in us.
TOMORROW: LUCY & MARY & BARNEY & EDITH & GRACE & FRANKIE'S "THE TANK"
