Anyone who is 17 today was born in the middle of the great financial crisis of 2008. What followed were: the so-called refugee crisis, Brexit, Trump, Covid, Ukraine, Gaza, Trump on steroids — always accompanied by increasingly grim climate forecasts, by growing financial insecurity for everyone who isn’t a millionaire, and by ever more aggressive revolutions from the political right.
Added to this toxic brew are the blessings of technological progress: thanks to the Internet, smartphones, and social media, facts and truth have become mere matters of belief, while hatred and nonsense spread as quickly as never before and body images are celebrated everywhere that are out of reach for most ordinary people. And now AI threatens to upend the world of work as well.
Mila Falls in Love with Ali
So, in other words, anyone who is 17 today has never experienced anything other than crises, insecurity, fears — and forecasts that everything will get worse in the future. No wonder this generation of teenagers is mentally more burdened than perhaps at any time in the past. All the statistics on mental health back this up.
When monstrous self-centered parents show up, as in the new TV series “Euphorie” on RTL+, that can even lead to an inpatient psychiatric stay. Mila (Derya Akyol) has just come out of one such stay at the beginning of the first episode. After classmate Basti (Kosmas Schmidt) posted a sex video of her online, the situation became completely unbearable. Her (long-divorced) parents feared suicide attempts and hoped that a clinic stay might help her.
It’s been a long time since Mila last felt happiness — somewhere far back in her childhood. That’s the case for most of the teens in “Euphorie.” The clinic stay helps Mila in the sense that she meets Ali (Sira-Anna Faal), a roughly age‑mate girl wrestling with similar problems. The two click immediately, but as Mila’s feelings intensify, Ali abruptly leaves the clinic.
Ali, Jannis — or Both?
Despite this setback, Mila eventually leaves the clinic again, living with her energetic, resolute but not very empathetic mother and her brother, who still hasn’t truly recovered from the sex tape. Most of all, she has to return to her school in Gelsenkirchen, where everyone knows about the tape and the clinic — and where, on the very first day back, a student jumps from the roof to his death.
Direct Link | Official trailer for the series
|
There is at least a glimmering light: while Mila searches for Ali, she instead meets Jannis (Eren M. Güvercin, Timothée Chalamet type), who also attends her school, but who also acts and is under the thumb of an overly ambitious father. This father sees him mainly as a possible source of money and devotes his attention otherwise to his second wife and their young child. Jannis’s mother killed herself when he was little — and he still holds himself partly responsible.
Mila and Jannis quickly realize how alike they are, but just as they grow closer, Ali suddenly reappears. However, she doesn’t want more than a friendship with Mila, because she fears getting hurt again, even though this relationship seems doomed to fail. Yet Mila would like more — and for now she leaves Jannis on the back burner, even though he would also like more.
Among the various supporting characters is Mila’s openly lesbian schoolmate Sophia (Luna Jordan), who is attracted to older women and flirts with a teacher. That teacher herself is also lesbian, but she doesn’t realize that the promising new chat partner in a dating forum is her student.
Too Much Misfortune and Trauma
That for the kids nothing ever goes right in the end, all hopes collapse reliably, and the world’s pain is constantly dulled with lots of drugs, comes across as bleakly overstuffed and somewhat unrealistic in its expansiveness. A lot of misfortune and trauma pile up — yet, according to mental-health statistics, many teens go through life relatively unburdened and content. In any case: if you’re looking for distraction and light entertainment, you’d better steer clear of “Euphorie” — the show really confronts its audience mercilessly with all the deficits of our time.
And for those who find the not-very-transparent title familiar: the new RTL series is a loosely German-language adaptation of the highly successful US series “Euphoria” (two seasons since 2019, a third is expected to follow in 2026), which in turn is based on an Israeli miniseries of the same name from 2012, set in the 1990s. This, in turn, was inspired by the British TV series “Skins” (2007-2013), which served as a springboard for young actors like Nicholas Hoult or Dev Patel to reach Hollywood. All of them revolve around teenage confusion, drugs, violence, sex, and relationship dramas. What it illustrates is that young people have probably never had it easy, even though things currently seem especially tough.
As a glimmer of light, perhaps, is how naturally and unproblematically queerness is woven into these stories. Yet even here the question remains how realistic that is in a time when queer people are increasingly cast as antagonists by many.
All eight episodes of “Euphorie” were released on October 2, 2025, on RTL+.
