There’s also the matter of her crush on Riley, another strong female lead who is sexually-curious, and figuring out what exactly she wants. Awkward and endearing, she is making her own way through high school while dealing with the reality that her mom was deported to Guadalajara. For the most part, everyone else around her seems to already know who they are, even when it is clear that they don’t. She’s a much fuller embodiment, and in no hurry to define herself. She represents all of Genera+ion’s possibilities for portraying teen life with genuine realism. She’s the tranquilizer shot to Chester’s perpetually-turnt, always-on-100 antics. But I suppose that experience is not completely untrue of high school teens have a tendency to inflate everything that they are going through into something, flipping the mundane into the apocalyptic, turning very small things into very large ones. The issues flare, multiply, compound-the something of Genera+ion is an ongoing hamster wheel, round and round, a perpetual self-made chaos. There’s also Martha Plimpton as the cliched villainous mother who refuses to believe that her son could be gay despite two of her close friends being gay. There’s talk of climate change and trans issues at some point a baby is born. Past all of the cringy maximalism, that’s what Genera+ion viscerally represents: big, empty statements and a lot of nothing.Įpisodes run the gamut: There’s one about a school lockdown and another dealing with the California fires. Later, upset over a small matter, he declares: “I’m the asteroid, you’re the dinosaur.” Writing wise, that fetish is apparent from the jump, which is one way to make sense of the show.
“My tolerance for giving a fuck is, like, minimal,” he tells Sam during their first meeting. Justice Smith ( The Get Down, Detective Pickachu) plays Chester, a gay water polo star with a 4.1 GPA who has a thing for the new guidance counselor, Sam (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett). Cumulatively, it all feels very high school, which is maybe the point. But the show has a strange fetish for big-statement shock that I can’t really explain, only to say that effect seems to be a symptom of its immaturity and performative wokeness. Not that it needs to be, because it is enjoyable at times, chaotic and so off the rails in that same way adolescence can be for teenagers that it does seem like it’s at least trying to have fun. (Don’t expect any of the arthouse intensity and cinematic glitter of Euphoria, you won’t get that here.) It’s not stylistically subversive in any format. Held to the standards of prestige TV, and certainly the variety of high-end drama that HBO regularly produces and that we expect from the premium cabler, Genera+ion is a disappointment. But knowing your audience, the issues teens face and how that emotional gulf is much wider than it was even a decade ago, doesn’t necessarily translate into compelling TV: Genera+ion fails to speak to its audience with any kind of full-body interiority. That suggests, one assumes, first-hand insight into the world we interpret on screen. Co-creator Zelda Barnz was 17 when she penned the script, along with her father Daniel Barnz, a screenwriter and director. Still, the alchemy of the show doesn’t totally coalesce in the way one hopes. What Genera+tion gets right, what it does understand, is how kids socialize-through texts and on hookup apps, by uploading selfies to Instagram, Snapchatting horny dick pics, and embarrassingly sliding into DMs.
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There’s a youthful literacy baked into the series that’s refreshing even when it fails to capture and sustain real meaning. From the very beginning, Genera+tion wants us to know that it is a show about representation, a realtime portrait of what teens experience today, how they communicate, and the roads they travel to be understood.