Not lengthy into the pilot of Genera+ion, the new HBO Max drama a few group of excessive schoolers coming into their sexual id, Chester receives a textual content from a secret admirer. Nathan, a fellow classmate, is crushing arduous. He’s bisexual, presumably homosexual—the present, to its credit score, is sluggish to counsel easy definitions—and has taken a current liking to Chester. “Ur crop top is cute,” he texts, however Chester doesn’t have time for video games. His response can be acquainted to younger folks fluent in the cadence of up to date social life, a picture-perfect illustration of our ever-connected age: “Who is this,” he shoots again.
From the very starting, Genera+tion needs us to know that it’s a present about illustration, a realtime portrait of what teenagers expertise in the present day, how they impart, and the roads they journey to be understood. There’s a youthful literacy baked into the sequence that’s refreshing even when it fails to seize and maintain actual which means. What Genera+tion will get proper, what it does perceive, is how children socialize—via texts and on hookup apps, by importing selfies to Instagram, Snapchatting sexy dick pics, and embarrassingly sliding into DMs.
Still, the alchemy of the present doesn’t completely coalesce in the approach one hopes. Co-creator Zelda Barnz was 17 when she penned the script, alongside along with her father Daniel Barnz, a screenwriter and director. That suggests, one assumes, first-hand perception into the world we interpret on display. But figuring out your viewers, the points teenagers face and the way that emotional gulf is way wider than it was even a decade in the past, doesn’t essentially translate into compelling TV: Genera+ion fails to talk to its viewers with any form of full-body interiority.
Held to the requirements of status TV, and positively the selection of high-end drama that HBO frequently produces and that we anticipate from the premium cabler, Genera+ion is a disappointment. (Don’t anticipate any of the arthouse depth and cinematic glitter of Euphoria, you received’t get that right here.) It’s not stylistically subversive in any format. Not that it must be, as a result of it’s pleasant at instances, chaotic and so off the rails in that very same approach adolescence will be for youngsters that it does appear to be it’s no less than attempting to have enjoyable. But the present has an odd fetish for big-statement shock that I can’t actually clarify, solely to say that impact appears to be a symptom of its immaturity and performative wokeness. Cumulatively, all of it feels very highschool, which is perhaps the level.
Justice Smith (The Get Down, Detective Pickachu) performs Chester, a homosexual water polo star with a 4.1 GPA who has a factor for the new steerage counselor, Sam (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett). “My tolerance for giving a fuck is, like, minimal,” he tells Sam throughout their first assembly. Later, upset over a small matter, he declares: “I’m the asteroid, you’re the dinosaur.” Writing clever, that fetish is obvious from the leap, which is one strategy to make sense of the present. Past all of the cringy maximalism, that’s what Genera+ion viscerally represents: huge, empty statements and so much of nothing.
It’s not all unhealthy nothing; some of it’s sweetly satisfying. Things do occur of course, and type of by no means cease taking place, which is a bummer as a result of that kind of narrative velocity suggests a scarcity of introspection that’s so outstanding in teen life. Still, the present’s moments of stoned serendipity are its best, its most looking out, uncommon as they’re.
Thematically and tonally, the nothing-space of the present is the place Barnz finds what revelation she will be able to. In the sequence’ third and fifth episodes, Chester, Greta (Haley Sanchez), and Riley (Chase Sui Wonders) spend the day collectively, driving via Los Angeles, unmoored from their each day calls for, smoking weed, sharing secrets and techniques, and visiting the aquarium, the place Chester and Greta solidify their bond. It’s a savory sequence of scenes that, in a approach, rivals what director Luca Guadagnino perfected with We Are Who We Are, one other current HBO coming-of-age drama about two sexually-curious American teenagers dwelling on a US army base in Italy. The method permits for area, for quiet, and for viewers to search out their very own which means as a substitute of it having it thrust onto them. That is the place the present hits a inventive stride, in moments of adolescent drift, when interactions, experiences, and confessions don’t really feel strained or labored, once they simply are.
