Documentary

Social Studies

Sep 2024 🇺🇸 FX Networks

Social Studies is a five-episode 2024 documentary series directed by Lauren Greenfield for FX, following a diverse group of Los Angeles teenagers through a full school year using footage drawn largely from their own phones, texts, and social-media feeds. Rather than reconstructing adolescence from the outside, the series lets subjects narrate their own experiences with cyberbullying, beauty-standard pressure, and the emotional highs and lows of algorithm-driven feeds. Critics and the show's own framing describe near-constant platform use as associated with anxiety, self-image strain, and shifting peer dynamics among the teenagers profiled, without reducing any single outcome to one cause. The series earned a 2025 Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series and won a Gotham Television Award. TechKids Foundation cites it as a rare screen-level record of how a school year actually looks through teenagers' own feeds.

2025 Primetime Emmy nomination

Social Studies was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series, per the New York Times' 2025 Emmy nominee list.

5 episodes, one school year

The series follows one group of Los Angeles high schoolers across a full school year in five episodes of roughly 56–66 minutes each.

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CITATION

Greenfield, Lauren (director). Social Studies. FX / Hulu, premiered September 27, 2024 (also premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, August 30, 2024).

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