For all of the awards and audience that HBO and whatever it chooses to call its streaming iterations have achieved in this century perhaps its most significant accomplishment is to be the home of a cultural icon that focuses on relationships which seems to define the dominant generation of each decade. In the oughts, it was arguably SEX AND THE CITY, which served as an homage to the maturing boomers and practically drove sales of TiVos and forced MVPDs to accelerate the rollouts of their own cheaper DVR alternatives. In the 2010s, it was unquestionably GIRLS, which elevated Lena Dunham to spokeswoman status for Tinder-driven millennials that mostly devalued themselves with tools (though admittedly that’s a quality not necessarily limited to their age cohort).
And as the 2020s dawned, just as Gen Z was ready for their own self-defining series, the talented Sam Levinson gifted them EUPHORIA, initially set in the challenging and at times downright frightening world of high school. Not the first, to be sure–we’ve visited that venue pretty consistently from the days of OUR MISS BROOKS to ROOM 222 to HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL and GLEE. But this questioning, brooding, tech-literate generation finally found its own voice in that which Levinson lensed, and the first eight episodes dominated the zeitgeist of summer 2019. NEW YORK REPORT’s Maria DelGattia captured the impact succinctly last week:
Euphoria, the teen drama that premiered in 2019 and quickly stirred debate over its unflinching look at addiction, sexuality, and identity. Set in a suburban town, the show follows Rue, played by Zendaya, as she fights relapse while her friends face their own crises. It became both a lightning rod and a launchpad, turning young actors into household names and sparking national conversations about youth culture. Euphoria arrived at a time when teen stories were shifting from glossy to unvarnished. It pushed that shift further. Graphic scenes and frank dialogue drew fire from parent groups and some critics. Supporters argued the show put words to real struggles many families face. The friction helped it dominate discourse and trend during each weekly release. The series paired a neon-soaked style with a pounding soundtrack and intimate close-ups. Episodes often focused on one character’s backstory, forcing viewers to sit with choices and consequences. That structure drove empathy, even when behavior was messy or reckless.
It was quickly renewed and in production when COVID got in the way of Season 2 so much that a mere two episodes aired as “specials” just before and after Christmas 2020. If you’re part of that generation, you’ll forever remember that holiday season where mistletoe was moot and indoor singing was deemed as a health hazard. You might still be in therapy from having to endure that–not to mention remote learning, endless binging and doom-scrolling that seems to have established a fairly low bar for what qualifies as intimacy by today’s twenty-somethings.
As a result of that production interruptus, it took until mid-2022 to get a full second season, which was generally seen as an overly indulgent disappointment by its most ardent supporters. I know plenty of parents and folks from my generation who would contend that pretty much aligned with how they felt about that generation as a whole at that time. But slowly but surely something resembling normal life has come back to this generation–nearly a week goes by where there’s not some encouraging lifestyle feature showing how in-person socializing and working in an office has grudgingly become to be adopted as a way of life, just like pretty much every generation of the previous hundred years did it. At long last last night, after an even lengthier hiatus that resulted from the availabilities of its cast of emerging superstars to the 2023 strikes the to ever-shifting priorities of rotating “business daddies”, a real third season of EUPHORIA plopped into the golden time period of Sunday 9 PM ET to put an exclamation point on that renaisaance.
It seems to be worth the wait. As THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER’s David Canfield explained, not only has the cast come of age and gained introspection, so too have Levinson and team:
“We have a motto of: Evolve or die,” Levinson says of how he and his crew approach each season of Euphoria. With the massive time-jump this go-round, Levinson and (DP Marcell) Rév knew that the cinematography would need to reflect that kind of dangerous maturity. “We wanted to make sure we were changing things up. We wanted to give it a feeling of a memory that was fading away – a bit rougher,” Levinson says. “We’re seeing them out in the world, in the wider world, and allowing the actors to communicate emotionally through the performance, as opposed to in the past, when we did it moreso through camera. We wanted to see them fending for themselves.”
Now freed from the shackles of high school, we now see these familiar characters in the midst of those hard choices. DEADLINE’s Katie Campione took particular note of that point in the review she dropped last night:
Levinson has repeatedly said he sought to explore “the Wild West of adulthood” with Season 3, visually drawing inspiration from the American West. Naturally, the first episode sets off on that circuitous journey through the lens of Zendaya’s Rue Bennett, whose debt to drug dealer Laurie (Martha Kelly) has come due since we last saw her. In the Season 3 premiere, Rue is cut off from most of her friends and family since relapsing and is now working as Laurie’s drug mule, body-packing fentanyl to smuggle it over the U.S.-Mexico border, which it turns out she’s got a knack for. Albeit seemingly an effective method for drug smuggling, its limitations mean she’s also recruited Faye (Chloe Cherry) to help her out.
It doesn’t take long for Levinson, who wrote the entire season and directed nearly all of it as well, to remind audiences why Euphoria gained much of its cultural cache in the first place with an incendiary scene that’s sure to spread like wildfire across the internet featuring Rue and Faye choking down fentanyl-filled balloons covered in petroleum jelly (and the graphic consequences).
FWIW, I found that scene both heartbreaking and engaging–pretty much as I net out about Gen Z as a whole. Campione didn’t seem to echo my sentiments:
Those characters are five years older, but none the wiser In fact, they seem to have defaulted back to the worst versions of themselves, if they ever grew beyond them to begin with – only this time, the safety net…is gone.
But as Canfield contended, there at least were some aha moments for Levinson, mostly as a result of his experience with a project that attempted to fill EUPHORIA’s void called THE IDOL, which landed with a thud in the summer of 2023. We were a bit more upbeat than many but generally agreed that it was a massive disappointment. If nothing else, it gave those behind the cameras needed guidance for how to “evolve or die”on their own accords:
Rév reveals that The Idol indicated how to expand Euphoria’s actual world too. “Thinking of The Idol, on a very practical level, it encouraged us to go out and shoot more real locations,” he says. “The second season of Euphoria was very much on a stage – 80% of if we didn’t have to go on location, we would build it on stage. Here we were pretty eager to find certain things in the real world.” Take that opening sequence: “We were able to build this 200-foot border wall out in the middle of the desert, four hours outside of Los Angeles, to achieve this sequence,” Levinson says. “She’s really up there – she’s 20, 25 feet in the air.”
This also informed the updates in the lives of Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) and Nate (Jacob Elordi), who we meet in the season premiere engaged and anxiously preparing for an expensive wedding. Scouting their gaudy, sunny California home proved crucial.
“An obvious choice would’ve been something modern and very plain and fancy, but we ended up choosing this mid-century home, which is a little tacky, but also stuck in the ‘70s,” Rév says. “It’s probably a strange choice, but also it gives us possibilities.” This goes especially for when Cassie pivots to making OnlyFans content to bolster their income.
It’s that plot line in particular that has prompted a significant amount of debate and polarizing opinions, as HAPPY FANS shared on they/them’s site this morning:
Fans on X (formerly Twitter) haven’t held back, calling it “disturbing” and questioning whether the show’s gone too far — especially given the wider conversation around hyper-sexualisation in media right now. Others reckon it might be playing out as a cautionary arc rather than something it’s endorsing. Either way, the shift in tone hasn’t gone unnoticed.
I’ll confess the idea of seeing Sweeney in such a world is something I found appealing. But once again I was left with a genuine sense of buyer’s remorse and a tad more empathy for the challenges of the generation coming of age in this decade. Having them get out in the world more may have been a stylistic choice but it’s also a healthy metaphor for how I’m hoping the EUPHORIA audience embraces this crucial season–especially in the wake of an impending anti-woke regime that will be scrutinizing its results with far less empathy than even I’ve capable of.
As one of my generation’s spokespeople sang in his ironically titled SUMMER, HIGHLAND FALLS (the fictional setting for the series is a suburban enclave called East Highland), it’s either sadness or euphoria. I’m hoping for the latter.
Until next time…