I can’t say I ever really enjoyed watching Euphoria, Sam Levinson’s hit high school drama, adapted from an Israeli original, that first aired in 2019. I remember watching the first season at the ripe old age of 26, clutching my pearls. I had decidedly aged out of being wooed by the aspirational misery of these cool teenagers, strung out on drugs at school and hurting each other in ever more outlandish ways, and instead felt like giving them a glass of water and a kick up the arse. Still, it was compelling television because the characters were people you could invest in, even as you watch them ruin their lives. It was, in all the good ways and the bad ways, gen Z’s version of Skins: lurid colours, terrible behaviour and populated by characters who felt original.
There’s been a four-year gap between this season of Euphoria and the previous one, for reasons including the Los Angeles fires, the pandemic and probably also the increasingly busy schedules of cast members such as Sydney Sweeney, Zendaya and Jacob Elordi who have ascended from little-known actors to global megastars in the intervening years.
With that cast now ageing and some in their mid-thirties, it was never going to be plausible for the third season of Euphoria to be a high school show. Arguably, that should have meant no third season of Euphoria at all. But a property this zeitgeisty—and therefore profitable—just cannot be allowed to finish at a sensible point. So instead, Levinson and his team have given us something completely different, a sort of neo-noir western set in today’s California: Rue (Zendaya), for example, is now a self-described drug mule, running back and forth across the Mexican border. But what they’ve also done is strip out what made rounds one and two of Euphoria watchable: the depth of the characters.
The person I’m most interested in, and the one who exemplifies what is wrong with this new season at a character level, is Cassie, played by Sweeney. Her storyline feels almost intentionally degrading. She is engaged to Nate (Elordi), whom she campaigned tirelessly to “steal” from her former best friend Maddy back in high school, and the two of them live in a hideous suburban mansion. Nate has inherited his father’s construction business, which is not going well, and Cassie’s primary drive in life is, explicitly, to persuade Nate to give her $50,000 to spend on flowers for their wedding, or to raise that money herself by becoming an OnlyFans model.
And so we see her getting the housekeeper to film her dressed up as a sort of sexy dog, a sexy baby, a sexy baseball player. Back in the first two seasons of Euphoria, viewers were familiar, often leeringly so, with Cassie’s breasts and with watching her debase herself to win some paltry smattering of the love she was deprived of by her alcoholic mother and absent father. But for all of Cassie’s mess—the vomit, the crying, the makeup smeared down her face—she was a character the show’s creators were interested in making us understand and feel some pity for. Now, Euphoria has decided to reduce her only to the most spectacle-generating parts of her character: getting her boobs out and being spoilt. It jars, also, because Sweeney and her body have become bizarrely culture war-adjacent topics in recent years, so it feels especially lazy for Euphoria to trot her out in this form. Here she is, that famous girl and her breasts.
Only three episodes of Euphoria were made available to critics in advance, so who knows where they’re going with any of this. But the feeling of season three is one of garish emptiness, in contrast to season one and two’s garish abundance. The first few years after leaving school can often be a strange and barren time. Your friends have gone their separate ways, your career is struggling to get started, all the schedules and structures that used to keep you grounded have gone. But that feeling pervades the entire production of this third season. It almost seems like Elordi, Oscar nominated and perhaps Hollywood’s biggest young heartthrob of the moment, has either forgotten or no longer cares who Nate is supposed to be, delivering a laughably flat performance. Maddy (Alexa Demie) is a caricature of a careerist LA girl; Cassie is a caricature of a casually cruel and bored housewife; even Rue, who once blazed at the centre of the show as a teenage addict who fell in love with a beautiful girl, feels stale here.
Perhaps we’ve all just moved on from Euphoria in the time since it last aired. But it shouldn’t feel like its makers have too.
