What to Watch After Euphoria Ends: The Best Scandalous Teen Shows
As Euphoria comes to a close, that weekly Sunday night ritual of tuning into HBO for the fright of your life comes to an and, too.
It’s been a wild ride for Rue and co., and for eight episodes, we have witnessed more suburban delirium and adrenaline than probably anyone ever thought they might see on primetime television. In one season, HBO bridged a gender gap in terms of nudity shown on screen, parents got angry, and breakout stars were born. And as crazy as Euphoria has been, it deserves a nod for its compassionate portrayal of addiction, depression, and anxiety, and is perhaps the first American series to really encapsulate the struggles of a particular subset of Gen-Z.
There will definitely be a second season of Euphoria coming down the pipeline, but what to do when you’re fiending for more intense teen dramas that might leave you clutching your pearls throughout the episode? Look no further: here are the five television series that will fill the Euphoria sized hole in your heart until it returns next year.
Skins
Perhaps the original “suburban teens giving parents anxiety attacks,” Skins was a pioneer of its kind. Every two seasons Skins cycled through with a new cast, but like Euphoria, each episode focused on the backstory of a particular character, and each episode featured copious amounts of drugs and sex, and it was shocking at the time to see these British kids in Bristol getting up to such drama! There was also the fact that Skins was a breakout moment for so many now A-list stars: Nicholas Hoult, Dev Patel, and Daniel Kaluuya to name a few.
Where to watch: Netflix
Elite
Elite is essentially Gossip Girl, but make it boarding school. The Spanish series follows a group of working class friends who receive scholarships to an elite private school, where they are excluded by the wealthy students and become embroiled in some melodramatic sexual adventures. Time is running out before season two returns, so you might as well binge season one and catch up now.
Where to watch: Netflix
Baby
Baby is another one of the year’s controversial series about teens, causing Netflix to receive some pushback for portraying a dramatized version of a true story, in which two young Italian girls become involved in an underground, high-end prostitution ring to pay for their luxury shopping trips (and school fees) around Rome.
Where to watch: Netflix
Skam
The acclaimed Norwegian web series that took the Internet by storm and broke streaming records in Norway follows a group of teens at a prep school. Skins-like in nature, Skam follows a new main character each season. Each “episode” could vary in form: it could be a clip, a fictional social media post, or a conversation posted to the Skam site every day, until it’s all put together into one singular episode by the end of the week. It is also available in at least six other languages. You can watch an American version, a French version, a Belgian version, a Dutch version, a German version, an Italian version, and a Spanish version of the series, all available in various pockets of the Internet that might require you to do a little digging (except for SKAM Austin, which is available to American audiences on Facebook Watch).
Where to stream: Facebook Watch for the American version, elsewhere online for the rest.
The Society
If the tagline “No parents. No rules. No way out,” doesn’t appeal to you then maybe The Society‘s cast is what will draw you in. Kathryn Newton, Kristine Froseth, Natasha Liu Bordizzo, and a handful of other up-and-comers lead this series about a Lord of the Flies-esque disaster in a suburban Connecticut town that has mysteriously lost all of its adults.
Where to stream: Netflix
Related: You Have to Read These Wild Fan Theories About the Euphoria Finale