The score - which is really more like an original soundtrack - was composed by the English artist Labrinth. The soundtrack - which time-travels from Steely Dan to DMX to Baby Keem - is handled by a music supervisor named Jen Malone. What holds all this together is the music: a maximalist, genre-agnostic soundscape that includes both a licensed soundtrack and a score. The show’s creator, Sam Levinson, 37, plays liberally with flashbacks, fourth-wall-breaking asides and magical-realist fantasy. The teenagers on this show are pushing the envelope - as TV teenagers do - but here they act out with postmodern panache. Like teen soaps since the dawn of television, “Euphoria” seems to be designed primarily to shock and titillate adults, updating the time-tested tropes of the genre (cheating, revenge, domestic abuse) with a new set of even more scandalous ones (camgirls, gender, the opioid crisis).
Late in the age of prestige television, we’ve arrived at what is perhaps the first prestige teen drama.
