Early EuphoriaIn the latest season, a whisper of a young woman walks down a crowded street in Mexico. He has swallowed several small sachets of powdered fentanyl, each balloon called painfully with the help of a bottle of cheap lubricant. Just as Rue (played by Zendaya) explains that these balloons need to stay put, the woman falls. The next scene finds him dead, a mess of balloons piled up around him.
Welcome back to TV’s most disturbing show—its kind. HBO’s drama about disaffected Gen Zers has never been an easy watch, but its latest season is working overtime to annoy viewers. Set five years after the events of End of season 2Season 3 of Euphoria has brought back most of its cast, whose characters are now in their 20s and in various states of torment. Rue, who began the series as an addict returning from rehab, is now forced to work for a drug queen. Nate (Jacob Elordi) has taken over the family construction business and is in serious financial trouble; Cassie (Sydney Sweeney), his aimless stay-at-home wife-to-be, gets a humiliating job on OnlyFans; and Maddy (Alexa Demie) and Lexi (Maude Apatow) toil as Hollywood assistants. Adults, according to Euphoriait’s a sad exercise in futility—a hopeless thing from which no one grows.
That denial is proving to be a weak foundation for a show set to reinvent itself after more than four years off the air. Unlike other youth dramas, Euphoria he never had to deal with the traditional pains of adulthood. Rather, his the first two seasons it featured very mature, often disturbing moments—a high school student having sex with an older man, a shootout that ends in the death of a child, Rue’s memory of an overdose. His hypnotic cinematography added a sublime sheen, adding to his exploration of children affected by hypersexualized social media and constant anxiety-inducing news. But Euphoria it also gave a glimmer of true hope for their future. The group’s tumultuous inner life is transformed through their relationships: Rue’s budding romance with classmate Jules (Hunter Schafer) underpins this story, making it impossible to turn into an interesting collage of nothing.
But Season 3, of which I’ve seen the first three episodes, is just a well-taken picture. The camerawork is still good: When Rue crosses the border after taking drugs, the screen is filled with beautiful sunsets and open spaces. Otherwise, the series comes across as a shadow of its former self, unable to justify following each main character on their separate post-high school journeys. Rue’s scenes being tutored by Alamo (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), a cruel and merciless club owner, seem disconnected from those of Nate arguing with Cassie about why she dresses like a cute puppy, which in turn feels unrelated to the sequence of Lexi walking her boss around multiple studios. Rue’s constant voice-over, where she muses about faith, the lack of direction of her friends, and the difficulty of making it rich, doesn’t help hold the story together. Everyone up Euphoria it may be problematic, but none of them seem to need anyone else for help.
Frequent gestures toward issues that concern Gen Zers also feel hollow. Early episodes include footage from the coronavirus pandemic; Jules announces that she rejects monogamy while on a date; Maddy talks about how she’s not like other people her age because, she says, “I believe in capitalism.” These events seem designed to cut off social media, turning participants into loudmouths of satire to mock their generation. And like other parts of Euphoria veers into crime-novel terms, the show flaunts what has always seemed to be its greatest conceit: using its provocation to explore how these traumatized youths make sense of the world around them.
Then again, Euphoriathe film’s producer, Sam Levinson, who based some of the group’s struggles on his own teenage experiences, has said that his approach is not “anthropological.” His intention, he he told it Hollywood Reporter last month, it was about showing “individuals,” not the entire population, and he was anticipating “very exciting” ways in which characters can mature from high school. The third season is sure to provide some excitement, especially in the form of a celebrity parade: Guest stars include Rosalía, Sharon Stone, and Marshawn Lynch. But their combined star power can’t hide how little they understand EuphoriaThe storytelling provides the way its characters process their 20s.
As I watched, I often thought Industryanother HBO scandal drama that came up big in its latest outing. On the show, the main investment bank that the main young characters worked for closed down, leaving the close-knit group to fall apart and causing the main cast to leave the series. Industry it thrived in its innovation, however, in large part because it expanded its scope beyond the trading floor and challenged its characters’ beliefs about wealth and power. Euphoria it does not question how the passage of time has affected its collection—why and how they have changed, beyond the job titles and social status they have acquired. If anything, the ensemble now resembles scandalous images of 20-somethings. That fragile world Euphoria constructed—a world that perhaps balanced the shocking and the heartwarming—has collapsed.
