What if Tech Billionaires Starred In Euphoria?
What would happen if you created a teen drama set in high school with actors in their mid to late 20s playing teenagers but instead of giving all the kids eating disorders and drug addictions, you based each character on a famous tech billionaire.
It was a weird thought I had the other night while trying to get into Season 2 of Euphoria.
Here is how I imagine the character arcs going…
The Mark Zuckerberg Character
Zuckerberg would be the unassuming kid who wears the same black t-shirt every day. He is always in the computer lab playing League of Legends by himself with headphones on. But mild-mannered appearances are deceiving, this character is actually the high school dealer, selling oxy through a vast network. Everyone loathes him/his product but still they still buy it in droves.
Sometimes he gets caught doing something flagrant but when he gets called in by the cops and questioned, they don’t press him too hard because they too are addicted. His character arc on the show follows that of Kevin Spacey in The Usual Suspects – he seems like the good guy, and it is only until it is too late that everyone realizes that he is Keyser Soze.
The season finale ends with him winking to the camera after leaving a backpack full of oxy at a middle school dance with this song playing in the background.
The Elon Musk Character
Musk would be the offbeat kid who one time showed up to prom dressed like a 1950s postman. He cares little about the social order and just pursues his interests – which are forward thinking.
He invented a program that allows students to share their notes.
He came up with a proposal that would vastly increase the efficiency of the parking lot.
He even invented a new version of Velcro in the chem lab.
The faculty hates him because he doesn’t conform and often calls out their stupidity. They would love to fail him but can’t because he has the populist support of the students, who find him hilarious.
The Jeff Bezos Character
Bezos starts out season 1 just being the nerd who read a lot and then he decided by season two that he needed to get good at everything so he could get into college. So, he became editor in chief of the newspaper and joined the Glee club and got involved in the student government. He even started playing sports and went from being totally scrawny to ripped. Watching him robotically accomplish all these things was annoying and it got even more annoying when it all worked, and he got into Harvard.
He puts forth a veneer of being cheerful while he is trying to crush you. To top it all off, he dumped the nerdy chick he had been dating since freshman year and is now hooking up with a cheerleader who had famously gotten railed by the entire football team.
The Richard Branson Character
Branson is the random European kid whose parents just moved to America. He is very charming, but no one is sure who he really is. Like he shows up at social events and at dances, but no one knows if he even actually attends school or is even from Holland like he claims. He is good at making friends with the other characters and they all hang out at his parent’s island vacation house.
The Jack Dorsey Character
Jack is a dork who runs cross country and can’t shut the fuck up about doing Outward Bound the prior summer and how transcendent that experience was. Like Mark, he too deals drugs (he mainly sells hallucinogens instead of Oxy) but at least pretends to be more conflicted about it and also doesn’t really know how to make money off the drugs he sells. He is a confusing character with all sorts of arcs where he appears bad and then good and then bad again. The only thing you are sure of by the end of season 4 is that for a 17-year-old he is good at growing facial hair.