What makes a great coming-of-age story? For me, it's an endless outpouring of emotion. It’s feeling like the world is ending at every turn. It’s your best friend in the whole world becoming your enemy the next day. It’s falling in and out of love faster than you can keep up with. It’s layers upon layers of drama that underdeveloped brains have to sort through, log and attempt to fix every day of their lives. 

 Add in smartphones and social media to the mix and you have a recipe for one delicious disaster. This is what makes young adulthood so temptingly exciting, and why the coming-of-age is an infectious genre, one we want to see again and again. We all have our own story; watching the trial and tribulations of those on a screen help us to relive those “butterflies in the stomach” moments all over again.

A new HBO Max original show “Genera+ion,” following in the footsteps of previous coming-of-age tales, aims to do just that.  

Created by father and daughter duo Daniel and Zelda Barnz, “Genera+ion” tells the story of a group of “Gen Z” Southern Californians navigating their way through their teenage years while facing sibling rivalry, sexual exploration, coming out and heartbreak — a telltale coming-of-age story. 

Throughout every episode, we delve into each character’s perspective, with a bold super that bears the character’s name. This structure occasionally waivers inconsistently per episode, but the series is tied together by a single event: a member of the friend group, Delilah (Lukita Maxwell) having a kiddie pool water birth in a shopping mall bathroom accompanied by frantic friends Naomi (Chloe East) and Arianna (Nathanya Alexander), who naively buy baby food and jimmy rig a shopping cart as a wheelchair. 

Between a school shooting lockdown, California wildfires, a failed school trip, bus breakdown and teen pregnancy, the show’s balloon was stretched thin across storylines and hot-button topics; it nearly burst — but it didn’t. Rather, character personas like the timid yet captivating Greta, the elusive Delilah and plot lines like the tense relationship between Greta and Riley, Delilah’s pregnancy and her relationship with the father of her child and the unresolved conflict with Nathan’s parents aren’t fully seen through to the end, often leaving us begging to know more. 

“Genera+ion” lives in a safety net of coming-of-age stories of the past, screeching toward danger within scenes, but never falling right into it. And maybe that’s what teenage years are truly like at their core — living in a perfect bubble on the brink of falling apart.

Youthful chaos overflowed from one scene to the next, replicating those crazy yet perfect teenage nights we all remember. But the characters always remained in a reserved space, reaching close to danger like a tide rolling onto a shore, then pulling audiences back into safety. Young adulthood is full of uncomfortable moments, and the vignette snapping between beloved characters barred us from sitting, well, too uncomfortably with those moments. 

It was extremely refreshing, additionally, to watch a series featuring several LGBTQIA+ main characters. The leader of the pack, Chester, was the heart of the show, and Justice Smith gave his character a loving performance that reminded you of an old high school friend. The series, unlike many of its kind, focused not on the struggles or hardships of being a queer teen, but the pure, blissful moments of being a teenager.