How young is too young to watch Euphoria on HBO?

Is PG-13 the new R? Euphoria on HBO makes a strong argument.

When media watchdogs get up in arms about teens watching racy content, who are they really protecting? Are they truly attempting to shield young eyes from seeing objectionable images, or are they just virtue signaling? In the case of HBO’s new drama Euphoria, it’s probably the latter. Yet, there might just be one key issue worth debating, which raises the question: how young is too young to be watching Euphoria?

Teens are exposed to sex, drugs, and rock and roll all day long, so many of the themes of Euphoria are nothing new to them. Let’s start with sex.

Porn is available everywhere, constantly, all the time, and it’s absolutely free to anyone of any age with access to unrestricted internet. This is obviously problematic, and Euphoria attempts to address that problem in the very first episode of the series by showcasing a sexual encounter driven by what young men learn by watching pornography.

It’s an upsetting sight, but the show flips the script by calling out societal norms and putting them in their place. This subversion of story is framed as an informative interlude, narrated by former Disney queen Zendaya herself.

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Same goes for the drug and alcohol storylines in the show.

Zendaya, recently one of the rising stars of the Disney empire, puts her squeaky clean image to task as the crux of the substance abuse narrative here. Through a series of solemn voice overs and flashbacks, her character Rue reveals that she recently overdosed on opiates and has no interest in getting sober. Why? Well, partially because the system had her hopped up on attention deficit medications since elementary school and she doesn’t know a life without pharmaceutical intervention.

Teens in the real world are no strangers to this approach, either. Driven by profit margins of Big Pharma and impatient parents and administrators, the idea of magically medicating children’s attention problems away instead of paying attention to nuance in behavioral issues is something that teens know all too well. Many adults don’t get it because they don’t have the time or patience to understand. Some of them are just too uncomfortable broaching taboo topics.

Instead of getting education from their parents (or, god forbid, school), teens often experiment with recreational drug use and casual sex. It’s a tale as old as time. That’s what happens in almost every single teen show, but Euphoria is on HBO instead of the CW, so they can show the reality in all its raw, unflattering glory. When teens are rudderless, with minimal guidance from older members of their support system, they’re more likely to make misguided choices that can result in dangerous outcomes.

So. How young is too young to watch Euphoria?

Well, the very issues that lie at the heart of the uproar about whether or not Euphoria is okay for teen consumption – too many penises, upsetting and graphic depictions of sex, teen overdoses – are things that the teens of today can certainly handle. Many can handle it because they’re literally living it. They’re careening around their world and sampling all the thrills that life has to offer. That’s youth, right?

So if we’re just assessing a baseline for whether or not teens are emotionally equipped to handle the presumably shocking content of Euphoria, the answer probably lies somewhere between 14 and 16 years of age. These are kids who have the entire internet at their disposal. They know how to inform themselves. So the young viewers who choose to tune in to Euphoria are already quite aware of what they’re getting themselves into.

And if drugs and sex were all that Euphoria had to offer, the conversation would probably stop here. It would also be a pretty terrible show. However, Euphoria smartly utilizes the depiction of these behaviors as a springboard to say more about teen mental health. But unfortunately that’s where things get a little sticky in terms of age-appropriate viewing.

The series traffics in some pretty graphic depictions of depression, anxiety, rage, and – in one extremely upsetting scene in episode 4 – the attempted suicide of a pre-teen. (Spoiler alert, I know, but it’s here to serve primarily as a trigger warning.)

Euphoria knows that untreated mental health issues such as depression and PTSD can result in an increase in risky behaviors, including engagement with sex and drugs, and the show earns major points for steering away from the glorification of either. As the series illustrates, society is often wont to demonize symptoms of deeper issues – ex: attention deficit issues, isolating, engaging in risky sexual encounters, drug overdoses –  instead of doing the thorny work of addressing the root of those behaviors. Ignorance to mental health distress isn’t bliss here. It’s killing teens.

The series may help some teens to not feel so alone in their mental health suffering. If the initial Twitter reactions are to be believed, many young viewers felt very seen by Rue’s voice overs focusing on her anxiety, numbness, and depression. That representation and validation of feelings is certainly a positive step, but without an outlet to process those feels after the credits roll, how young is too young to watch Euphoria?

I’d argue that trigger warnings have no age limit, and that Euphoria is best watched with a friend at your side, whether that’s physically or via text. The most important message that Euphoria has to offer thus far is that burying problems under a whirlwind of numbing behaviors is an unproductive coping mechanism, and that building support systems and bringing problems to the light is vital to survival at any age.

Euphoria airs Sundays at 10/9c on HBO.