“That’s the beauty of this country we call America,” a new acquaintance tells Rue (Zendaya) in the Season 3 premiere of “Euphoria.” “Anyone can reinvent themselves.”
It’s a line that practically demands placement at the top of a review — a statement of purpose so direct a critic could almost resent the lack of interpretation required. But in typically maximalist fashion, the HBO drama doesn’t stop there. In the next episode, Rue gets another piece of advice, this one from her ex Jules (Hunter Schafer): “You can’t just show up after all this time and think everything’s gonna be the same.”
More than four years have passed since “Euphoria” first graced the airwaves, and sure enough, very little is the same. Nor could it be: since 2022, the signature creation of auteur Sam Levinson has sustained the tragic deaths of cast members Angus Cloud and Eric Dane as well as the exit of a third, Barbie Ferreira. (Dane had completed filming for Season 3 prior to his passing from ALS complications earlier this year, while Cloud had not.) Behind the scenes, producer and key Levinson collaborator Kevin Turen died in the fall of 2023. Such unforeseen catastrophes, together with the Hollywood strikes and the increasingly famous cast’s tight schedules, pushed “Euphoria” further and further past the plausible time window for a show set in high school.
Creative differences between Levinson and HBO over where to go from this existential crossroads delayed the season even further. As reported by my colleagues, potential directions included Rue — introduced as a teenager working to overcome her substance addiction — working as a pregnancy surrogate or a private detective, but “the new scripts simply didn’t feel like the show tonally.”
After all that angst, the first three episodes of Season 3 (out of an eventual eight) do feel like “Euphoria”: bombastic, stylish and able to offset grandiosity with sly, cutting humor. What they don’t feel like is tethered to the grounding ballast that kept the first two seasons on the rails even at their most over-the-top. “Euphoria,” the first teen-centric show in the history of its prestigious network, has always been the R-rated version of a high-school drama, but a high-school drama nonetheless. Characters conformed to certain archetypes: Rue’s friend Lexi (Maude Apatow) was the shy, perceptive nerd; bully Nate (Jacob Elordi) was the rich jock who abused his abundant privilege with glee. Crucially, the show’s histrionic extravagance had a purpose in illustrating the life-or-death stakes of youthful emotion. It was absurd to juxtapose Lexi’s tell-all school play with a deadly drug raid, as the Season 2 finale did. It was also effective.
In Season 3, “Euphoria” retains the crime elements without the strategic contrast. Rue has spent the past five years ferrying fentanyl across the Mexican border, working off her debt to stateside dealer Laurie (Martha Kelly). The premiere opens with Rue driving her beat-up car up a jerry-rigged ramp and over the border wall, only to leave it suspended mid-air after several riveting minutes of silent maneuvering. In a sense, it’s the ideal reintroduction. The scene is gorgeously shot by cinematographer Marcell Rév and absorbingly acted by Zendaya, whose star power is on full display as she wordlessly commands the camera. But it’s also a little empty and showy for its own sake, which the viewer may realize when they later learn Rue has driven through the border crossing many times without incident. (She’s become a pro at smuggling baggies in her gut, as demonstrated in a gruesome, gag-filled montage.) Why leave the vehicle hanging? Because it looks incredible, one presumes. Any story progression is just a nice bonus.
Such showmanship is nothing new; the absence of a center of gravity to check Levinson’s instinct for excess, however, is. “Euphoria”’s best attempt at a replacement is a sudden emphasis on the sex trade that spans the cast. Through a series of maneuvers, Rue manages to trade Laurie’s coercive employ for that of Alamo Brown (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), a strip club magnate who quickly puts her to work managing one of his establishments. Rue is on the same path as several of her former classmates: Jules has dropped out of art school and taken on a sugar daddy to support her painting practice; pouty, self-pitying Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) has started an OnlyFans to fund her upcoming dream wedding to Nate.
Love Film & TV?
Get your daily dose of everything happening in music, film and TV in Australia and abroad.
The switch in uniting themes is so total and abrupt that it can’t help but feel somewhat random. Addiction hasn’t disappeared from the story entirely; Rue lies to Jules that she’s now “California sober,” and her duties at the Silver Slipper club include chaperoning employees to rehab. In a note accompanying the advance screeners, Levinson cites the third of 12 steps in the Alcoholics Anonymous program — surrendering control to a higher power — as inspiration, and Rue does flirt with Christianity in conversations with her sponsor Ali (Colman Domingo). But at least in the season’s first half, Rue’s recovery is no longer the driving force of “Euphoria,” even as the show is still named for the high she’s chasing with drugs. And three hours in, it’s still not clear what so compels Levinson about the exchange of intimacy for money that he’s made it the new focus of the show, besides (optimistically) an ambition to make sweeping social statements about America under late capitalism or (cynically) a desire to pose Sweeney in various skimpy outfits.
And yet! Levinson still gets the best performance out of Sweeney the rising star has given since…the last season of “Euphoria.” “The Housemaid” and “Anyone But You” may be blockbuster hits, but it’s here where she gets to play the wide-eyed Cassie hardening into a demanding, materialistic housewife-in-training. Even if her character may not make much sense anymore — twentysomething Cassie seems to crave pampered domesticity and online notoriety in equal measure — Sweeney gets a lot to work with, like a long-awaited confrontation with her former best friend Maddy (Alexa Demie), and rises to the occasion. In that poolside scene alone, she’s by turns vulnerable and defensive, performative and pleading. Given how wooden the performer can be at her weakest, “Euphoria” seems to unlock something in Sweeney, just as the tomboyish, deadpan-but-sensitive Rue remains one of Zendaya’s signature roles even as she launches original adult fare like “The Drama” at the box office.
Watching Season 3, it’s easy to see why “Euphoria” launched or accelerated so many careers, and why (besides contractual obligation) most returned for what sure seems like one last hurrah. Nor, seemingly, is it done boosting profiles: Akinnuoye-Agbaje is a veteran actor, but he’s positively magnetic as the seductive, menacing Alamo, who Rue compares to the devil in a characteristic bit of subtlety. Guest stars like Sharon Stone and Spanish pop star Rosalía have shades of stunt casting, though they’re strategically deployed — in Rosalía’s case, by poledancing in a neckbrace. It’s clearly rewarding and, just as important, fun to act on “Euphoria,” perhaps even more so when the story is increasingly unmoored from any stable foundation.
As a result, “Euphoria” is never not entertaining. Over the years, Levinson has proven capable of crafting an engaging spectacle in his sleep. (Even “The Idol,” his disastrous collaboration with The Weeknd, demanded attention, if not approval.) There’s just a disjointedness to the various elements of Season 3 that this new incarnation of “Euphoria” has yet to overcome. The Western landscapes that form Levinson’s latest visual obsession are a feast for the eyes, but the new genre doesn’t feel any more connected to a suburban coming-of-age story than the characters’ new pursuits.
What few attempts at cohesion do exist only emphasize how much “Euphoria” has outgrown, or outlasted, its origins. Lexi now works in a Hollywood writers’ room, which tracks with her past as a playwright; Maddy working as a talent manager to the star of Lexi’s show comes off more convenient than convincing. At least Cassie and Nate’s doomed-seeming union, if not her new side hustle, feels like an extension of the original mission — they’re becoming their parents, as underscored by affecting, sometimes hilarious turns by Dane and Alanna Ubach as Cassie and Lexi’s mother. Everywhere else, it’s hard to shake the sense that “Euphoria” has become fanfiction of itself, or perhaps a Trojan horse for a scattered slew of ideas Levinson has shoehorned into his current platform. When I pressed play on the Season 3 premiere, I was eager to learn what kind of show “Euphoria” is now. Close to its halfway point, I still don’t really know.
“Euphoria” Season 3 will premiere on HBO and HBO Max on April 12 at 9 p.m. ET, with remaining episodes airing weekly on Sundays.
From Variety US