‘Missing’ Invigorates the Mystery Genre with ‘Gone Girl’-Meets-‘Euphoria’ Blend

Media keeps getting teens wrong. While it may seem ridiculous when shows like Euphoria portray some teens as throwing ridiculously giant parties and wearing clownish outfits, believe it or not, a handful of teens do live like Alexa Demie does in the show. The Fault in Our Stars, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, and The Kissing Booth, three wonderfully cheesy romance films, tried to convince us that teenagers are emotionally mature enough to fall in love—and they are!

And now, Missing tries to prove to us that a young woman would be able to solve her mother’s disappearance on her own—and, guess what? It's plausible.

What is being misconstrued about being a teen in films and TV isn’t what the teens are doing, from hosting parties to falling in love—it’s how they’re doing it. Shows like Euphoria and Gossip Girl try to bring social media and texting into the equation without understanding how teens actually flip through their phones. There’s the cursed giant text bubble that floats over characters’ heads, like an item in Mario Kart. Instagram captions are littered with hashtags (nobody uses those); they’re overwritten, dull, and nothing like what you’d see in the real world. No, the teens in our entertainment text like aliens. “Ru coming?” they write, as if teenagers use “r u” and punctuation at all, let alone in the same message.

Read more at The Daily Beast.