In FX’s ‘Social Studies,’ Social Media Is “a Lifeline and a Loaded Gun” for L.A. Teenagers
The trials of the final year of high school in America have been fodder for television dramas for decades. But social media and its seemingly mandatory presence in the lives of teenagers has ramped up the drama, self-doubt, anxiety and all the other angst around this formative period, which can make life for this closely-watched demographic nightmarish. Or, has it?
With her latest project, FX’s Social Studies, photographer and documentary filmmaker Lauren Greenfield gets up close and personal — into their cellphones, personal — with an array of California teens and finds something unexpected behind the moaning over the never-ending cycle of posting, sharing and scrolling from America’s youth.
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Social Studies debuted two of its five episodes on FX last week, and will roll out the remainder of its season on Fridays. For the project, 15 students were trailed over the 2021-22 school year as they navigated issues persistent for teenagers, as well as some other fresh obstacles unique to the social media era. Bullying, sexual awakenings, teen pregnancy, school shootings, body dysmorphia and eating disorders all make their appearance over the five hours — as do vigilante justice, some infuriating and other heartwarming parents, and party scenes that will make one second guess if Euphoria’s portrayal of teenage life is such an exaggeration after all (as The Hollywood Reporter‘s Daniel Fienberg also compared in his review). And the gimmick the director introduces here is novel — on screen, with a rather dazzling presentation, we see the subject’s social posts as their stories unfold over the year.
The series comes as the debate around social media’s impact on teens has reached a fever pitch. In August 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General released a report that detailed the positive and negative effects of the ubiquitous medium that indicated it can be associated with distinct changes in the developing brain, including the amygdala, which is important for emotional learning and the prefrontal cortex, which is crucial for impulse control, emotional regulation, and moderating social behavior. The report also states that social media use could increase sensitivity to social rewards and punishments. A year later, the Los Angeles Unified School District board voted in a 5-2 decision to ban student cell phones and social media in schools while classes are in session amid rising concerns about its impact on youth mental health.
Greenfield, a film festival circuit darling who won a directing prize at Sundance for her 2012 hit The Queen of Versailles, burst onto the scene at a young age in 1997 with a powerful monograph titled “Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood.” It successfully shows, through around 80 photos and some accompanying interviews, Los Angeles’ youth culture at its most image-conscious and influential. Speaking with THR, Greenfield explained the genesis of the Social Studies project, which started when she noticed her teenage son’s despondence following periods of heavy social media engagement during the COVID-19 lockdown. After 150 days of filming and two years of editing, it evolved into a sprawling film about the first generation of kids coming of age while fueled by the dopamine rush of likes and shares.
“I felt like something’s going on differently with this generation, who’ve grown up on this thing,” Greenfield explained of the series’ initial development. “And it was an opportunity for me to go back to my roots. My first book was about L.A. teenagers and how they’re impacted by the media-saturated culture and influenced by what I called ‘the values of Hollywood’ — which I thought about as celebrity, image and materialism. And I was seeing all of these things amplified to the nth degree in the social media era.”
With the project, she sought to create a social experiment that combined the verve and vérité of documentaries with what would essentially be another camera on the phones of her 15 subjects. The goal was to understand the impact of the devices, which Gen Zers use on average over six hours each day, and the media they create on its makers and as consumers.
After an engineer hired, and failed, to figure out how to lift social posts from the phones of her project’s subjects, Greenfield’s son came through for her, again, when he found a hack to get the process moving — albeit, one that required a full-time producer dedicated to downloading and organizing all of the posts over the five-month shoot. To cast her series, Greenfield conducted over 200 mini-interviews, but this was only a jumping-off point, as the final group of 15 teens, most of whom attend the Palisades Charter High School and hail from across the Southland, evolved more organically, she said, as one subject was often leading her to another.
“It’s probably very diverse kids because I didn’t want at the end of the day for people to be like, ‘OK, those crazy kids in L.A., or those rich kids, or those people from whatever area,” she said. “And so the kids come from all different neighborhoods, different socioeconomic backgrounds, and also have different relationships with social media.”
The result is a kaleidoscopic panorama of L.A. teen life that works as a snapshot or a time capsule, capturing both the persistent drama of those years that everyone knows — the gossip, the awkwardness, the awakening desires and all that anxiety — and also, a delve into the experience of the teens who came out of the COVID era, when their social lives were lived almost entirely online, to find themselves face-to-face with one another, and fall into the rhythms and habits of high school once again. And with these teens representing a broad swath of L.A.’s population, some are immersed in some specific situations that mirror the city itself.
Ellie, a senior, details the aftermath of her breakup with a famous young actor and the harsh backlash she experienced on social media; later, we watch her presumably repeating some mistakes that torch friendship and her education. Backstabbing and revenge are dished out for Bella, who dares to kiss her friend’s crush. And aspiring DJ Keshawn finds he already has to hustle at his young age to mix work and school with teenage fatherhood. Meanwhile, a wild party thrown by Jack, a young entrepreneur with a major social following, gets out of hand and ends with an overdose.
That event is early in the series and is shown to Social Studies’ audience through various interviews, where partygoers give their accounts of what happened and via collected social media videos that piece together a narrative. It’s a moment of tonal shift where the teen subjects are in, and are creating, actual danger; that sense of uneasiness, while not persistent over the series, does return. What Greenfield captures is in turn shocking (a school shooting scare feels particularly raw), infuriating (a mom’s embrace of the MAGA mindset and refusal to accept her trans child), surprising (who knew choking out is now a major teen kink?), relatable (college admissions rejections) and hopeful (first days on campus). Most importantly, throughout the series the teens speak for themselves and, for the most part, find their way.
“I think the kids are very resilient and that a lot of them find their voices,” Greenfield shared. “I feel like finding yourself, and your voice is the antidote to social media and constantly comparing yourself or wanting to be somebody, some fictitious peer.”
The scenes of teenage life are interrupted throughout the series for roundtable discussions. Greenfield hits pause and sits with a group to talk frankly about the concerns and issues dragging them down. Here, a commonality is revealed among a diverse set of young people and frequently, refreshing insights are spoken as these peers have a direct dialogue — it functions as the antidote to social media’s conceit.
So, where does this whirlwind overview of a year in the life of COVID-19 teens land regarding the merits of social media? And, is being a teenager stuck with this all-encompassing medium more difficult than in years’ past? For the director, the medium has both positive and negative effects, but algorithmic rules and government regulation can and should pull some of the levers to solve its problems. On the latter question, the director says there’s no debate.
“I think it’s way harder,” Greenfield said. ”And that was one of the surprising things: almost every kid said if they had a choice, they would rather live in their parents’ generation, before social media. Like Jonathan at the end: ‘It’s a lifeline, but it’s also a loaded gun.’ They admit they can’t live without it because it’s the way their age group communicates. They know what’s going on. And as another person at the end says, ‘Do you even exist if you’re not on it?’ It feels existential.”
Social Studies releases new episodes Fridays at 10 p.m. ET on FX, streaming the next day on Hulu.
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