For approximately the last five years, platforms have been working hard to glue Generation Z to the small screen. This is seen in TV series and influencer programs (most of which are highly laughable and nauseating) with which TV3 promotes national youth and also, regarding the Yankee scene, in a more interesting narrative that enjoys conjugating the no-future stuff.
The most paradigmatic product of this phenomenon is Industry, a story of a group of young aspiring banking investors who can only discover something similar to love and transcendence by exercising cruelty. In a way, the series culminates the ethics of capitalism that, in masterpieces like Mad Men, still retained the glamour of dandyism, but which now openly exposes characters who, whether or not they come from good families, will only be accepted by the industry if they agree to be miserable (important note; notice how one of the show's secondary characters, the graceful Kiernan Shipka, has gone from being the adorable cute daughter of the Drapers to a secretary-pimp for young girls).
Americans are very astute people and have commissioned products like Industry from Mickey Dona and Konrad Kay, two former millennial financiers reinvented as screenwriters who know the world of London ties well. However, the work still falls into the boomer clichés we associate with youth, describing a soft generation without moral roots that is only capable of momentarily forgetting their daddy issues through high doses of sex and cocaine. This is the case with its protagonist, Harper Stern, a young woman – in fact, an actress with a devastating physique for pedophiles like Myha'la – who has landed at the investment firm Pierpoint by falsifying her university degree and (professionally) assassinating some of her colleagues. Despite the clichés, Industry ends up being well digested because it describes a stage of capitalism where the psychology of the impaired affects the masses and the elites equally or, in other words, where even people like Musk and Altman can end up squandering almost everything because they don't know how to manage their emotional flaws.
This apparent complexity of present analysis is further distorted in Sam Levinson's famous Euphoria, a series that begins with a certain grace, showing the dark side of the idyllic life of American suburban high schools in the nineties (think of things like Saved by the Bell, which would now be quite embarrassing) by indulging the ego of people who grew up in the old middle class through the portrayal of a current generation permanently doped, offered only the privilege of creatively managing their failure. This is a product with a certain malice given that its protagonist, the excellent Zendaya, was a child raised in the clouds of Disney Channel who here acts as a drug addict who has the relative luck of ending up surviving (spoiler alert, also dying) thanks to drug trafficking. One must acknowledge the author of Euphoria an overdose of misogynistic animosity, because after sexualizing Sydney Sweeney ad nauseam, the unfortunate Cassie ends up married to a ruined, third-rate charlatan whom she can only save thanks to her impressive chest.
"Industry and Euphoria fail in the description of Generation Z, not only because they go overboard in their degradation"
The moral undergrowth of all this is clear; not only are we faced with a frothy regurgitation of the capitalist precept of the fight to the death to survive, even at the cost of ending up prostituted, but also with the fatal conclusion that one can only find peace by plotting their own collapse (our colleague Eudald Espluga talks about all this in a good, albeit communist-leaning, book, Imaginar la fi, published by Raig Verd). I could share the misfortune of a generation that, in a way, is lost in the world because it lives alienated from its roots. But I would say that falling into the argumentative filigree of placing the responsibility for this liquid life on young people, without paying attention to the culture that previous generations have given them, turns out to be a fraudulent enterprise. Industry and Euphoria fail in the description of Generation Z, not only because they go overboard in their degradation, but above all because they wash their hands by falling into what they criticize most in adolescents; creating an industry of euphoria without authors or any cause.