As I've written about before, EUPHORIA is a really interesting show. It has a lot of creative ways to tell story.
I'm just now working my way through season two, and I was really struck by the way writer Sam Levinson interweaves some of the character narratives early in the second episode. He begins one character's story, then has that character intersect with someone else, and basically does a hand off. But unlike say, THE WEST WING, the handoff moment doesn't involve that new character's story going forward, but rather a time jump back that shows us how they got to the point where we find them as they've intersected with the first character.
So, we start with Rue, Jules and Elliott. And when Jules finds out Rue met Elliott at the New Year's party where she was using, Jules walks away, very upset. And she goes into the bathroom, passing Cassie.
And instead of following Jules into the stall, we instead cut back to Cassie's drama about Nate, how in fact Maddie had warned her before she hooked up with Nate that she is so desperate to be loved, and the trouble that brings upon her. She has to say no.
Then we follow Cassie doing exactly the opposite of saying no, all the way to Nate having to deal with all her neediness after the fact.
Other than one quick Maddie/Nate moment we stay with Cassie until she's talking to Maddie on the phone while Maddie is babysitting. And then we get another hand off to Maddie, in which we learn all about this babysitting job she's got, and how she's trying on the wife's fabulous clothes and almost gets caught.
And then we cut back to the bathroom, but now it's Maddie and Kat talking, which becomes a way to hand off to Kat and her fantasy that instead of having a nice guy for a boyfriend she would basically have Khal Drogo come and savage her, which she then tells the girls is what Ethan did to her.
Then things get a little bumpy for a moment—we're with Nate and his dad and then through him Cassie. There's no handoff per se, but it is the way that the show brings us back to that moment in the bathroom that began the sequence, except now we're focused on Cassie, until Jules comes in, at which point the story gets handed back to her. And start to finish everything is accompanied by Rue's narration.
There's lots we could say about this approach. Thematically it seems like a great way of representing the experience of the characters, how everything is always shifting and nonlinear for them, past and present and one another are all sort of happening at the same time.
From a storytelling point of view, it's also a way of keeping the momentum going. You could very easily break these individual stories up and tell them separately. Really, with the exception of Cassie the stories are separate, one following the other. But by giving them a beginning that you have to return to, Levinson creates a sense of orientation and expectation. We are headed somewhere.
I think there's also a way in which because these stories are framed as one story bloc, each next story sort of rides off the energy of what's come before. Maddie's story, for instance, is great on its own; but coming into it straight off of Cassie's increasing craziness gives it extra oomph. It's a bit like drafting in team cycling or skating; in traveling behind one of your teammates you end up having to work less hard, so that when they fall away you can really kick it into another gear.
It's satisfying, too, just for the sheer craft of it. It's just fun to start on one character, see the story get passed around and then wait to see how will they get back to where they began. It's like a game that the show is letting us play with it.
There's a couple pretty standard ways of telling a story on television. And they're the standard ways because they work. But they're not the only ways to tell a story. And watching EUPHORIA is a great way to be reminded of that fact.
