Its central guiding metaphor, as its title suggests, may be the pleasures and perils of drugs, but Euphoria is just as interested in frank depictions and discussions of its characters’ sex lives.īut on American television, even in 2019, full frontal male nudity - especially the kind that Euphoria so brazenly portrays - still feels like an affront.

Priding itself on frankly depicting these various issues, the show manages to make provocative television that skirts (and at times treads over) the line of propriety. Slowly introducing us to her various classmates (and their idiosyncratic histories, sexual and otherwise), Rue offers us a glimpse into a world where dick pics, sex tapes, stolen opioids, underage sex, and cam sessions are a quotidian part of the 21st-century high school experience. (And write-ups of the show were happy to harp on the drama’s provocativeness, noting the presence of “ close to 30 penises” in one scene.) Euphoria is narrated by Rue Bennett (Zendaya), a 17-year-old who recently overdosed and is just returning home after a stint in rehab. Many scenes in Sam Levinson’s Euphoria, which premiered on June 16, seem intent on shocking its viewers. Beyond the rarity of this image, there is a lot of weighted cultural baggage in this blurry shot of Dane’s (prosthetic) dick. The frame keeps Jules in focus, allowing the full frontal nudity in front of us to remain in soft focus. The dreamy eeriness of the moment makes the shot that follows all the more jarring: As Jules (just in her underwear) remains seated on the bed in the background, we see the man putting a condom on his hardened penis. Remaining standing, his face obscured by the camera’s framing, he begins to push his fingers into her mouth, asking her to open wider. As he talks to her, the camera focuses on her face. Stoic about the soulless life he leads in this small town, the unnamed older man (Cal, we later learn, played by Eric Dane) takes pleasure in ordering around the young nubile girl with pink-tinged long blonde hair. A young girl named Jules (played by trans actor Hunter Schafer) giddily shows up to meet an older man she’d first contacted online. There’s a scene in the pilot episode of HBO’s Euphoria that is, pun intended, hard to shake off.

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