Euphoria TV Review - Common Sense Media

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Parents' Guide to

Euphoria TV HBO Drama 2019

• Common Sense Says
• Parents Say 67 Reviews
• Kids Say 365 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

By Joyce Slaton , based on child development research. How do we rate?

age 18+

Wall-to-wall sexual violence, drugs, language in dark drama.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Euphoria is a drama series about a teen girl who's working through addiction along with the usual challenges of adolescence. It features lots of boundary-pushing content related to sex, drugs, and sexual violence. Girls are violated in many ways, including being leered at, groped, and…

Why Age 18+? Violence & Scariness

Violence is often sexual, which can be quite disturbing: A boy vividly pictures

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Sex is often linked with violence; see "Violence & Scariness" section. Chara

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Teens often drink, smoke marijuana, and take pills by mouth or crush and snort t

Language

Swearing is frequent: "f--k," "s--t," "p---y," "a--hole," "bulls--t," "bitch," "

Products & Purchases Not present Any Positive Content? Diverse Representations

Main character, Rue, played by Zendaya, has one Black and one White parent. She'

Positive Messages

Positive messages are few and far between, but female friendships are often stro

Positive Role Models

The characters are teens who are trying to do the right thing, fighting against

• Parents Need to Know

  Parents need to know that Euphoria is a drama series about a teen girl who's working through addiction along with the usual challenges of adolescence. It features lots of boundary-pushing content related to sex, drugs, and sexual violence. Girls are violated in many ways, including being leered at, groped, and touched without their permission. Boys wonder whether girls are "whores" and share girls' images on social media "slut pages." Standard episode content includes things like a girl being thrown up against a wall and choked and a drug dealer forcing characters at gunpoint to take off their clothes. Expect frequent nudity in both sexual contexts (a girl takes topless pictures to send to her crush) and nonsexual (nude boys cavort in a locker room). Viewers also see many "d--k pics," and older characters have sex with or come on to underage teens. Characters' early trauma is explored, along with how it affects their present-day issues. Girls are often depicted as abused and boys as abusers; though some characters do have redemptive arcs, there's not a lot of kindness or thoughtfulness on display. One character is addicted to drugs; many scenes depict her smoking, drinking, taking pills, or snorting (pills or white powders). Frequent swearing includes "f--k," "s--t," "p---y," "a--hole," "bulls--t," "bitch," and "d--k." While this is a show about teens, the extremely mature content is most appropriate for adult viewers. And it all gets amped up even further in the second season, which includes Rue's continuing relapses, sexual violence, assault, and frequent nudity.

• Violence & Scariness

  a lot

  Violence is often sexual, which can be quite disturbing: A boy vividly pictures his girlfriend getting kidnapped, bound, and thrown in the trunk of a car, after which he fantasizes about shooting her kidnapper. A boy and girl start to have sex, whereupon he chokes her (he stops after she asks him to). A drug dealer says that a girl should have "some other way to pay" for drugs. Nonsexual violence is also intense: A boy beats another boy to a bloody pulp; the same boy chokes his girlfriend, leaving marks on her neck; and a girl threatens her mother with a piece of glass during a fight. Characters are beaten, shot, and attacked in various physical and emotional ways.

  Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

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• Sex, Romance & Nudity

  a lot

  Sex is often linked with violence; see "Violence & Scariness" section. Characters engage in sex frequently: Images include naked body parts, a man putting on a condom, a character flinching and crying as a man has sex with her, and a boy trying to choke a girl during sex. Brief clips from hardcore pornography, including a flash of an erect penis. A girl has sex at a party; she's recorded, and the video is shared without her permission, which makes her feel both shamed and desirable yet leads to an incident in which a much older man masturbates (which is shown) while on a video chat with her. Boys speculate on whether girls are a "whore" and talk about how much "p---y" the boys are going to "smash." Nudity is frequent, from underage characters taking nude photos of themselves to an entire locker room of full-frontal male nudity with about 20 close-up shots of penises.

  Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

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• Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

  a lot

  Teens often drink, smoke marijuana, and take pills by mouth or crush and snort them. A character overdoses; she's discovered by her family and sent to the hospital and then rehab. A very young boy sells drugs with his older brother. An extended scene explains how a character beats an over-the-counter drug test despite still using. A parent guzzles wine. An addicted character struggles with staying sober.

  Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

  Get started Close

• Language

  a lot

  Swearing is frequent: "f--k," "s--t," "p---y," "a--hole," "bulls--t," "bitch," "d--k." A song includes the "N" word.

  Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

  Get started Close

• Diverse Representations

  a lot

  Main character, Rue, played by Zendaya, has one Black and one White parent. She's diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and her mental health and that of other characters is explored in depth. Rue also identifies as queer, and her budding relationship with female-identifying Jules is central to the series. Jules is a transgender character played by a transgender actor, and her experience is portrayed with nuance and complexity as the series goes on. Maddy and Chris are Latina and Black, respectively, and their experiences living in a mostly-White community are lightly touched on in their backstories. Kat is the sole character with a larger body type, but she finds empowerment through running an online sex chat business. Characters are also portrayed as socioeconomically diverse. Lastly, the show explores toxic masculinity through Nate, who struggles with anger, his sexual identity, and his dad's high standards.

  Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update .

• Positive Messages

  very little

  Positive messages are few and far between, but female friendships are often strong and supportive, and female friends consider each other important. Messages are occasionally pro-woman but often couched in so much disturbing material that their reception may be muddled. Rue says at one point about "slut pages" (social media pages of non-consensually shared nudes): "It's 2019, and unless you're Amish, nudes are the currency of love. So stop shaming us and shame the a--holes who make password-protected online directories of naked underage girls."

• Positive Role Models

  very little

  The characters are teens who are trying to do the right thing, fighting against their emotions and basest desires. Sometimes they succeed, but often they fail. Girls are generally treated poorly by men. They're expected to be sexual but are harshly shamed and mistreated when they are and sometimes physically abused as well. Girls also subject their looks to harsh scrutiny ("I literally look disgusting," says one very conventionally attractive girl, looking in the mirror). For their part, boys are often depicted as leering, abusive louts, subjecting the girls to many different stripes of sexual violence. It's said about one boy that "He knew he had anger issues, but so did every guy."

Where to Watch

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Euphoria

Parent and Kid Reviews

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• Parents Say (67)
• Kids Say (365)

age 16+

Based on 67 parent reviews

See all 67 parent reviews age 15+

Based on 365 kid reviews

Kids say that this show offers a brutal and eye-opening portrayal of teenage life, tackling heavy themes like addiction, violence, and sexuality. Many reviewers underscore the necessity of maturity over age when considering who should watch due to its graphic content and complex subjects, recommending it primarily for audiences aged 15 and older.

• maturity over age
• graphic content
• heavy themes
• relatable messages
• explicit portrayals

Summarized with AI

See all 365 kid reviews

What's the Story?

The teens in EUPHORIA are feeling anything but. Fresh out of rehab, Rue (Zendaya) doesn't even make it a week before she's back buying drugs from Fezco (Angus Cloud) and making a new best friend in Jules (Hunter Schafer), who's new in town but quickly runs afoul of Nate (Jacob Elordi), the alpha-male football player who's more dangerous than anyone realizes. Meanwhile Kat (Barbie Ferreira) suffers from a lack of love and the lack of regard she gets from other people who don't appreciate her body type, Maddy (Alexa Demie) is blithely unaware of how scary her longtime boyfriend is, and Chris (Algee Smith) can't figure out how to be close to a woman that's not a moving image on a screen. High school was never easy, but surely this is a new low.

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Is It Any Good?

Our review: Parents say (67 ): Kids say (365 ):

People say youth is wasted on the young, and it certainly seems that way in this compelling but ugly series in which teens exist in hells often of their own making. Damaged by her father's early death, the casual cruelty she sees around her, and her own (labeled by an expert) faulty brain chemistry, Euphoria's lead character Rue snorts, smokes, and drinks everything she can get her hands on. Her terrified mom tries both sending her to rehab and giving her over-the-counter drug tests, which Rue foils by racing across town to procure her former best friend's fresh, clean urine. And yet Rue is one of the characters who's (mostly) just abusing herself; the way others treat Jules, Kat, and Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) is far worse.

Both the camera and these girls' peers leer at them endlessly, evaluating them from a distance. How do they look? Are they hot? More importantly, what will they do sexually? Sex becomes something that boys try to trick or shame girls into, and when Cassie genuinely responds to Chris at a party, his response is to pin her down and choke her, as he's seen done in pornography. (He thought she would like it.) Kat definitely doesn't like the boys who surreptitiously filmed her losing her virginity at a party and posted it on a "slut page" for the whole school to laugh at. And, as we soon learn, the boys who treat their classmates and neighbors so terribly are themselves abused -- by parents who don't care, by parents who aren't there, by parents who themselves do terrible things. Some characters get more of a redemptive arc than others, but most just struggle, fail, and struggle again. It's a miserable cycle, and though Euphoria is hard to watch, it's equally hard to stop.

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Talk to Your Kids About ...

• Families can talk about whether it's OK to show teen sex, drinking, and drug use on television. Do shows like Euphoria present a realistic view of teen life, or is anything exaggerated for entertainment? What would the real-life consequences of the characters' behavior be?

• Euphoria contains an extensive amount of nudity, particularly male full-frontal nudity, which is very rare in American movies and TV shows. Why? Why are women shown nude more frequently than men? How often is the nudity in Euphoria related to sex and how often is it nonsexual -- e.g., people bathing or changing? Does it matter?

• Does this show make being a teen look like fun? Is it realistic? Do the teens you know look and act like this? Do they have these types of problems? Does a show have to be hyperrealistic to be enjoyable?

• Do you know anyone who is struggling with drug abuse or addiction? What are the challenges they might face? What are some resources you know of that could be helpful?

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TV Details

• Premiere date : June 16, 2019
• Cast : Zendaya , Sydney Sweeney , Maude Apatow
• Network : HBO
• Genre : Drama
• TV rating : TV-MA
• Award : NAACP Image Award - NAACP Image Award Nominee
• Last updated : October 9, 2025

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Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Euphoria

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