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HBO is beginning to develop a tradition of Left-coded shows that, in fact, constitute quietly conservative art. Lena Dunham spent six seasons of Girls insisting she was a progressive provocateur, while her show methodically documented the wreckage that follows from a generation raised without any of the old constraints.
Sam Levinson’s Euphoria is doing something similar — and in some ways doing it more brazenly. The show is not conservative in its tone or aesthetics. It is loudly offensive, hypersexual, and soaked in rave-like neon. Its characters are drug addicts, sex workers, and deeply damaged young people doing deeply stupid things to themselves and each other. It does not directly or moralistically preach restraint. But it shows, with unflinching honesty, what life without restraint actually does to the people living it.
The first episode of the new season, which premiered on Sunday, makes this argument with great clarity. Early in the episode, Rue — Zendaya’s character, a not-so-recovering addict now working as a drug mule — finds herself in dire straits while transporting narcotics across the US-Mexico border. She ends up sheltering with a white Christian family living in rural Texas: many children, a modest home, a life organized around faith and simplicity. To gain their trust, she invents a cover story: she’s a college journalist writing about the drug crisis and the evil pouring across the southern border. They welcome her in. They feed her. They put her on a Greyhound bus. They ask for nothing in return.
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Jesse Arm is the director of external affairs and presidential initiatives at the Manhattan Institute.