‘Social Studies’ Review: FX’s Effective but Messy Docuseries About Teens on the Internet Is Basically ‘Euphoria’ in Real Life

In the recent Netflix drama Penelope, a teenage girl abruptly leaves everything behind to live off-grid in a national forest. While her motivation isn’t exactly explained for much of the season, it’s implied that she doesn’t feel at home in the modern world, that her decision to set aside her phone is empowering and good for her mental health.

For a better sense of what would cause a 16-year-old to select a wilderness without Wi-Fi over contemporary life, check out FX‘s new five-part documentary series Social Studies, from director Lauren Greenfield.

Getting an autumnal premiere presumably because its examination of the technologically addicted existence of a 21st century adolescent is scarier than the serial killers and miscellaneous ghouls normally filling television schedules in October, Social Studies is meant to horrify, surprise and occasionally move viewers.

And it works! You’ll find yourself investing quickly and deeply in the cast of relatable not-quite-kids and not-quite-adults assembled by Greenfield. You’ll laugh a bit and cry occasionally. Every once in a while, the documentary delivers the sense that this generation might be better equipped to handle our excessively connected, proudly exhibitionistic and eerily voyeuristic society than the ones who set this reality in motion.

At the same time, as effective as Social Studies is, it’s frequently a mess. Greenfield sets herself up with an extremely ambitious but simultaneously contained project, and then struggles with focus, thematic clarity and, honestly, following her own rules. The meandering result feels like it’s succeeding almost exclusively because of the condition that it’s critiquing: the inability of these teens to distinguish between “public” and “private,” consequences be damned.

Is Greenfield exploiting the personal drama of her subjects, or are they exploiting the platform that she’s offering them? And in 2024, is there a meaningful distinction between those things? Expect some waves of discomfort.

The series’ conceit is that for the 2021-22 school year, Greenfield followed a group of students from an array of economic and racial backgrounds — though mostly attending Palisades Charter, which brings in teens from all over Los Angeles. They are, Greenfield explains, the first generation to grow up with social media for their entire lives. Of equal importance, these are also young people who lost over a year to COVID lockdowns. From March 2020 until the end of the summer 2021, social media was a complete stand-in for what was once a far more varied menu of interactions.

“In person, you can’t mute yourself and you can’t turn off your camera,” says one young woman, delivering one of many lines that feel poignant in their preternatural wisdom. “You have to show up to school and you have to be perceived by every single person there.”

Greenfield’s great inspiration was getting her subjects to agree to “screen recording,” allowing us access to all (or the perception of “all”) of their video calls, messages and even casual online surfing sessions. She fills the frame with a surplus of visual information, simulating a distracted and disorganized adolescent mind.

Beyond the screens, the crew had some access to the kids at school and even more access to their lives outside of it. If there are things that these youths feel self-conscious about doing in front of a camera, there’s little evidence of that reserve here. We’re warned at the start of each chapter that the show “contains visual of minors participating in illegal and unsafe activities.” This mostly means drug use, though the subjects are completely candid when it comes to discussing their sex lives and plenty of other details that are maybe “sketchy” if not “illegal.”

Early in the premiere, Greenfield mentions that the production has a therapist on-call if anything proves to be “activating” for the kids, but the therapist is never mentioned again. The subjects appear to be more comfortable discussing their deepest, darkest secrets — what secrets they still have — with their peers in organized discussions, in libraries, classrooms and bleachers. The conversations, which cover everything from the disorienting experience of “going viral” to the insidious creep of cyberbullying to the unavoidable prevalence of, well, insidious creeps, deliver many of Social Studies‘ most potent moments. In bold relief, they capture the difference between the unexpected loneliness of virtual communities and the catharsis possible through real-world interaction.

We aren’t privy to the casting process, but over the five full hours, we get close to at least a dozen students. There’s Jonathan, an aspiring documentarian who does possibly too much of Greenfield’s homework for her in interviewing his classmates and, by the fifth episode, attempting to sum up the thesis for his own film so that Greenfield doesn’t need to.

There’s Keshawn, an aspiring DJ who has just become a father. There’s Jack, an aspiring party planner and brand mastermind; his wild birthday bash features some of the most harrowing footage in the series and instigates the first of several references to HBO’s Euphoria, another “the kids aren’t alright” touchstone that I’ve always felt was made primarily to terrify parents rather than to entertain the demographic featured onscreen. There’s Ellie, who had a wave of social media notoriety as the tween girlfriend of a tween movie star and is in the process of moving from one possibly toxic relationship to another. There are victims of sexual assault, and one former student who has turned himself into an online vigilante outing perpetrators.

Some of the teens have hands-on parents who are at least trying to understand the way this generation engages. A few have parents who think they’re still kids themselves. At least one student has an ultra right-wing mother, whose own conspiracy-clouded perspective is attributable to a different bubble within the social media landscape.

You’ll notice, as you watch, a number of people who appear early but then vanish entirely, or who can be spotted in the background but don’t get their first identifying chyron until the fourth or fifth installment. This is a natural byproduct of documentaries like this — not everybody is going to be as quotable as you expected or have a senior year filled with dramatic high or low points.

But it’s also a reflection of Greenfield straying from the work’s initial purpose. What starts as a look at a group of active high schoolers expands to include Sydney, a college enrollee already facing regrets about the way she presented herself online when she was a minor, and Nina, the 20-something trans sister of one of the participants, who suddenly takes the show over at certain points. You might forgive the spotty editing if the distraction were exclusively in the direction of shiny new storylines capturing elements of the experience not previously represented. But on the other side of the attention spectrum, we spend seemingly hours on Ellie’s repetitive love life because … she once dated an actor from It?

The series labors to find thematic connections within episodes. Too often, they seem to be working down a checklist of relevant pros and cons, reminding us that for every resource connecting a confused child to information about depression or eating disorders, there are as many opportunities for anonymity to fuel gossip and dangerous paranoia.

There’s so much information packed in that there’s no wonder Greenfield (and Jonathan, her helpful high school proxy) meanders in seeking a conclusion. Eventually, she settles for prom and college acceptances, after skipping what feels like most of the spring without explanation. The last chapter or two are choppy enough to give the impression that this was designed as an eight- or 10-episode project but then got hacked indiscriminately down to five. But whether your takeaway is repulsion or affection or newfound understanding or the desire to seek out an Instagram-free existence in the wilderness, Social Studies will stick with you.