Lauren Greenfield's FX Documentary About Teens Online

In the recent Netflix drama PenelopeA teenage girl suddenly leaves everything behind to live off the 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 put away her phone is both motivating and good for her mental health.

To better understand what might drive a 16-year-old to choose a Wi-Fi-free wilderness over contemporary life, watch FX's new five-part documentary series Social Sciencesby director Lauren Greenfield.

Getting a fall premiere presumably because its examination of a 21st-century teenager's technologically dependent existence is scarier than the serial killers and assorted ghouls that normally fill October television schedules, Social Sciences It aims to horrify, surprise and sometimes move viewers.

And it works! You’ll quickly and deeply invest in Greenfield’s relatable cast of not-quite-kids and not-quite-adults. You’ll laugh a little, and cry a little. Every now and then, the documentary gives the sense that this generation might be better equipped to handle our overly connected, proudly exhibitionist, and disturbingly voyeuristic society than those who set it in motion.

At the same time, as effective as Social Sciences is, often is, a mess. Greenfield sets out to create a wildly ambitious yet contained project, and then struggles with focus, thematic clarity, and, frankly, following his own rules. The tortuous result seems to succeed almost entirely because of the very condition he's critiquing: these teenagers' inability to distinguish between “public” and “private,” consequences be damned.

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

The idea behind the series is that for the 2021-22 school year, Greenfield followed a group of students from a range of economic and racial backgrounds, though most attended Palisades Charter, which takes in teenagers from across Los Angeles. They are, Greenfield explains, the first generation to grow up with social media their entire lives. Equally important, these are also young people who have lost more than a year to COVID lockdowns. From March 2020 through the end of summer 2021, social media has been a complete replacement for what was once a much more diverse menu of interactions.

“In person, you can’t mute yourself and you can’t turn off the camera,” says one young woman, uttering one of many phrases that seem touching in their otherworldly wisdom. “You have to show up at school and you have to be felt by every single person there.”

Greenfield’s great inspiration was to convince his subjects to accept “screen recording,” giving us access to all (or the perception of “all”) of their video calls, messages, and even the occasional online browsing session. He fills the frame with a surplus of visual information, simulating a distracted and disorganized adolescent mind.

In addition to the screens, the crew had some access to the kids at school and even more to their lives outside of it. If there are things these kids are uncomfortable doing on camera, there’s little evidence of that secrecy here. At the start of each chapter, we’re warned that the show “contains images of minors participating in illegal and dangerous activities.” That mostly means drug use, though the subjects are completely candid about their sex lives and many other details that are perhaps “suspicious” if not “illegal.”

Early in the premiere, Greenfield mentions that the production has a therapist on call in case anything proves “triggering” for the kids, but the therapist is never mentioned again. The subjects seem most comfortable discussing their deepest, darkest secrets (which secrets they still have) with their peers in organized discussions, in libraries, classrooms, and on the sidelines. The conversations, which cover everything from the disorienting experience of “going viral” to the insidious creep of cyberbullying to the inevitable prevalence of, well, insidious creep, provide many of the Social Sciences' most powerful moments. In stark relief, they capture the difference between the unexpected solitude of virtual communities and the catharsis possible through real-world interaction.

We don’t know the casting process, but over the course of the full five hours, we meet at least a dozen students. There’s Jonathan, an aspiring documentary filmmaker who gives Greenfield perhaps too much homework for her, interviewing his classmates and, by the fifth episode, attempting to summarize the thesis for his film so Greenfield doesn’t have to.

There's Keshawn, an aspiring DJ who recently became a father. There's Jack, an aspiring party planner and branding genius; his wild birthday party features some of the most heartbreaking footage in the series and triggers the first of several HBO references. Euphoriaanother “kids are not okay” staple that I always assumed was designed primarily to scare parents rather than entertain the on-screen demographic. There’s Ellie, who’s had a wave of social media fame as the preteen girlfriend of a preteen movie star and who’s bouncing from one potentially toxic relationship to another. There are sexual assault victims and a former student turned online vigilante who exposes the perpetrators.

Some teens have hands-on parents who at least try to understand how this generation interacts. Some have parents who think they’re still kids. At least one student has a far-right mother whose conspiracy-clouded perspective can be attributed to a different bubble in the social media landscape.

You'll notice, as you watch, a number of people who appear early on but then disappear entirely, or who can be spotted in the background but don't get their first identifying chyron until episode four or five. This is a natural byproduct of documentaries like this: not everyone will be as quotable as you'd expect, or have a dramatic high or low senior year.

But it’s also a reflection of Greenfield’s shifting away from the work’s initial scope. What begins as a look at a group of active high school students expands to include Sydney, a college freshman who’s already dealing with regrets over the way she presented herself online as a minor, and Nina, the twentysomething trans sister of one of the participants, who suddenly takes over the show at points. You might forgive the choppy editing if the distraction were solely in the direction of shiny new storylines that capture previously unrepresented elements of the experience. But on the other end of the attention spectrum, we spend seemingly hours on Ellie’s repetitive love life because… she once dated a It?

The series struggles to find thematic connections within episodes. Too often, it feels like they’re working from a checklist of relevant pros and cons, reminding us that for every resource that connects a confused child to information about depression or eating disorders, there are just as many opportunities for anonymity to fuel gossip and dangerous paranoia.

There's so much information that it's no wonder Greenfield (and Jonathan, his helpful high school stand-in) have a blast trying to wrap things up. Ultimately, he settles in for prom and college admissions, after skipping what feels like most of spring without explanation. The last chapter or two is choppy enough to make it feel like this was intended as an eight- or ten-episode project, but was then indiscriminately cut down to five. But whether your takeaway is revulsion or affection or a newfound understanding or a desire to seek an Instagram-free existence in the wilderness, Social Sciences will stay with you.