Held to the standards of prestige TV, and certainly the variety of high-end drama that HBO regularly produces and that we expect from the premium cabler, Genera+ion is a disappointment. But knowing your audience, the issues teens face and how that emotional gulf is much wider than it was even a decade ago, doesn’t necessarily translate into compelling TV: Genera+ion fails to speak to its audience with any kind of full-body interiority. That suggests, one assumes, first-hand insight into the world we interpret on screen. Co-creator Zelda Barnz was 17 when she penned the script, along with her father Daniel Barnz, a screenwriter and director. Still, the alchemy of the show doesn’t totally coalesce in the way one hopes. What Genera+tion gets right, what it does understand, is how kids socialize-through texts and on hookup apps, by uploading selfies to Instagram, Snapchatting horny dick pics, and embarrassingly sliding into DMs.
There’s a youthful literacy baked into the series that’s refreshing even when it fails to capture and sustain real meaning. From the very beginning, Genera+tion wants us to know that it is a show about representation, a realtime portrait of what teens experience today, how they communicate, and the roads they travel to be understood.
