In what way? Millennial troubles are well documented: trouble finding jobs, expensive housing, huge debt, etc. As for the younger generation, I don't know, many of the ones I now live tough lives. Drama at home, parents with drug addictions, growing up with social media and 24/7 news to put kids face to face with every world tragedy on a daily basis, active shooter drills in school. I just had a student who graduated in June shot and killed a couple weeks ago. His dad died the same way 15 years ago. Maybe in Beverly Hills life is cushy and easy, but I suspect it was just as smooth 30 years ago as it is today. In most parts of the country, life isn't easy.
I can actually use a couple of "depressing" Netflix shows to answer your question. A friend talked me into checking out
Atypical, an autism sitcom. At first i over-reacted to the show in a bad way because my first professional experience in the psych biz was with autistic teens and i have been at odds with the way they are educated & integrated ever since.
Eventually, though, i came to realize that
Atypical is in many ways a brilliantly conceived and written show. It understands comedy, family, love in ways most sitcoms don't. But i still had problems with it. I realized that, like a lot of Netflix shows, its flow chart was too dense, too many things were happening at once. Since i've written comedy for over forty years, it is anathema to me to miss jokes and even worse to shorten story/character-development arcs when there is so much more dough in lengthening them, but
Atypical was skipping a lot of humor
in order to keep the interpersonal drama dense. I had noticed a similar problem in
Ozark - too many things happening at once, cramming two seasons into one, which makes less financial sense than artistic even.
I found my answer to why in
Atypical's Season 1 closer. There were two moments in the ep that were so unforgivably cruel, callous and cavalierly dealt with that i automatically concluded the season could not be resolved without them being addressed, so i assumed they would be the cliffhangers. I was wrong - showrunner Robia Rashid quite cleverly, if unsatisfyingly, had all the story lines resolved and the characters smiling on the shelf by show's end. And it was then i realized I have been away from society too long.
In my world, NO WAY can the utter shaming of a teenage girl, as the autistic lead unwittingly did at the beginning of the episode, have a short recovery arc. It is an impossibilty. But here it wasn't. WHY THE #### NOT?! I reverse engineered it and realized - EVERY problem i had about the show is that not one character ever resolved any of their problems nor got to the heart, the moral center of even the most important matters. They tossed their identity into the fray, it got observed, reviewed & returned by everyone in their lives and on to the next. Didn't matter if everyone was doing that at the same time, cuz the most anybody was going to react was a wisecrack a "that's not me, that's you" shrug and a swipe left. That's why each character was more the sum of their distractions, their eccentricities, their defenses than their strengths or beliefs. Everyone's a ****, so i'll be one too and so will he and so will she and we'll all shrug off each other's dickishness over&over&over and that's life.
No, it is not. Stop the world, i wanna get off.