Zendaya in Season 3 of HBO's 'Euphoria' HBO There aren’t many shows on which the gap between audacious moments that move or amaze me and complacent moments that perplex or irritate me is as great as it is on Sam Levinson‘s HBO drama, Euphoria.
Perhaps my biggest stumbling block with the show can be summed up via this simple question, which I’ve spent two seasons, plus two bonus episodes, pondering without a consistent determination: Is Euphoria actually a provocative show, or is it simply an exploitative show that looked provocative because it was focusing on characters who were too young to vote?
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Euphoria
The Bottom Line Great moments and tawdry moments still competing. Airdate: 9 p.m. ET Sunday, April 12 (HBO) Cast: Zendaya, Hunter Schafer, Eric Dane, Jacob Elordi, Sydney Sweeney, Alexa Demie, Maude Apatow, Martha Kelly, Chloe Cherry, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje and Toby Wallace Creator: Sam LevinsonAt least a partial answer comes in the third season that, for all manner of reasons, arrives more than four years after the conclusion of the second. I’ve always leaned in the direction of “exploitative,” despite bracing injections of “provocative,” and the new season would seem to confirm it, as the characters leap into young adulthood and the series leaps closer to flashy irrelevance.
It isn’t that these new episodes lack for standout features, with the performance from Zendaya foremost among them. Television’s Mount Rushmore of antiheroes and antiheroines is crowded, and if Zendaya’s Rue isn’t carved into the primary peak, she’s somewhere immediately adjacent.
But the series as a whole? Attention-demanding things that played as extreme and terrifying when they were happening to teenagers simply become “things” when the protagonists are in their 20s; heightened ideas that played as gloriously melodramatic and precariously edgy expressed through high-schoolers barely count as “ideas” when run through a 20-something prism.
The three episodes sent to critics peak very early. Like “the first scene of the first episode” early, with Rue making her way across the Mexican desert on a drug run rocking out to Christopher Cross’ “Ride Like the Wind,” presumably because it contains the lyric “I’ve got such a long way to go/ To make it to the border of Mexico,” though when Rue makes it to the border she encounters Trump’s border wall. That instigates a protracted silent comedy set piece that straddles Levinson’s sweet spot between absurdist humor and nail-chewing tension.
We find out quickly that Rue has landed in indentured servitude to Martha Kelly’s deadpan kingpin Laurie, bringing shipments into the country in the most unpleasant ways possible, accompanied by Faye (the astonishingly good Chloe Cherry, now a cast regular).
It’s far from the worst life that Rue has lived, but it isn’t great. Hope comes in the unlikely form of swaggering strip club magnate Alamo (a flawlessly menacing Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), whose body-commodifying version of capitalism seems preferable to the life Laurie offers, at least until it doesn’t.
The new episodes, all written and directed by Levinson, spend a lot of time updating us on the post-high-school lives of our favorite characters.
Nate (Jacob Elordi) has taken over his father’s (the late Eric Dane, whose appearance in the third episode is potent) real estate business, leaving Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) at loose ends in their tacky mansion. Loose ends for Cassie usually lead to self-exploitation, as she starts off building a mainstream sexualized social media profile but begins to look toward OnlyFans, which seems to offer greener pastures, at least until it doesn’t.
I’m not going to spoil the lives that Lexi (Maude Apatow), Maddy (Alexa Demie) and Jules (Hunter Schafer) are navigating, except to say that on Euphoria, all storylines are not created equal and that’s perhaps even truer of this new season.
For much of the time, only Rue’s story has any clear momentum, with Lexi stuck as a total afterthought and Maddy only slightly more relevant. Cassie’s arc, a mixture of wedding planning and predictable directorial leering, feels like a rather cruel commentary on the way Sweeney has been fetishized by the entertainment industry, with Levinson putting her through the normal assortment of revealing costumes (or lack thereof) and slo-mo jiggling only to have characters repeatedly comment on how basic she is. Whether you feel that Euphoria is being pointlessly cruel to Sweeney or just giving fans what they want, it feels like a waste after her operatic work in the second season. But Sweeney, like everybody else, gets a lot to do in a third episode that’s so chaotic and over-the-top that it could be a finale.
Without the familiar thematic underpinning of American youth gone sour, Levinson turns his eyes to a broader and probably even more familiar critique of contemporary American capitalism. Mining Western genre archetypes aggressively — Hans Zimmer’s score is mighty Morricone-esque, while Ford-ian framings abound — the third season of Euphoria reflects on the state of Manifest Destiny and the promises of wealth still offered by the wide open expanses of the American West. Characters on Euphoria are selling drugs (and therefore death), sex (and therefore death) and death (and therefore somehow real estate) — but mostly they’re all selling their bodies and souls as part of the promise of an American Dream that is no longer available without a cost, an idea Levinson seems to have just discovered.
Given that Levinson’s most reliable move is “excess” — every scene in every episode feels protracted, sometimes in entertainingly effective ways and more frequently in self-aggrandizing ways — the season’s Los Angeles and Los Angeles-adjacent settings are a natural fit. It’s a season of lurid neon signs, tawdry Hollywood apartment complexes, tasteless shag carpeting and Sydney Sweeney in canine cosplay undulating to “How Much Is That Doggy in the Window,” all treated with the same level of affection. Neon, shag carpeting and Sydney Sweeney are pillars of American identity, stretched across generations and mixed into a toxic, Trump-era brew with the series’ normal surplus of tears, blood and the new addition of pig urine. Don’t ask.
We are not living in subtle times, and Euphoria has never been a subtle show. But it’s hard not to feel like every one of Levinson’s targets this season is past the sell-by date for perceptiveness, so he just hovers on the surface of shoddy land deals, Hollywood glamour and the ethics of OnlyFans (which is dealt with in more appealing, but no more timely, fashion on Apple’s upcoming Margo’s Got Money Troubles).
Through it all, Zendaya is a marvel, delivering what is simultaneously among the broadest and most quietly nuanced performances on television, equally able to meet Martha Kelly’s trademark monotone and Akinnuoye-Agbaje’s larger-than-life bluster on their terms. After all this time, I’m still not convinced that Rue is a good or interesting character — Levinson learns so heavily into self-destructive tropes for the character that any native personality beyond “addict” gets lost — but watching that light go on and off in Zendaya’s eyes is always impressive. Whether the season arc involving Rue finding religion will develop depth or remain a bit glib is unclear.
So far, though, Zendaya feels like she’s carrying even more of the show than usual, especially with Sweeney and Elordi existing primarily as eye candy — they’re presented as the embodiment of Orange County tastelessness — and Apatow and Demie feeling like intruders in what was once their show. Schafer is stuck in that eye candy mode for a while, albeit impeccably styled and photographed, in contrast to what Levinson does to Sweeney, but she has a scene with Dane in the third episode that leveled me. I’m not sure how much more, if at all, Dane will appear in the season, but it marks a rare piece of intersecting character and real-life tragedy that feels organic and earned.
So far, nothing comparable has been done for Fezco, albeit in the absence of the late Angus Cloud. Fezco’s fate after the end of last season has at least been acknowledged, which is more than can be said for several other characters who were shuffled off, without ceremony, to make room for a ton of new actors and characters. Darrell Britt-Gibson and Marshawn Lynch make the biggest impressions of the new supporting players and Sharon Stone and Kadeem Hardison at least merit attention because of who they are, if not what they’re playing. The show has become increasingly busy, without necessarily becoming increasingly involving and, especially in the second episode, I was intellectually checked out much more than was ideal.
But here it has to be acknowledged: Through the first three episodes of last season, I probably would have accused Euphoria of having lost whatever mojo it once possessed, but I thought the two-episode climax, complete with Lexi’s deliriously Brecht-on-acid or Fellini-on-whippets play, represented a weird-ass pinnacle for the show. Nothing in these first three episodes suggests an approaching opportunity on that scale, but who can say for sure?
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