Naomi Fry reviews Season 3 of the HBO drama, which seems to have clicked into a thrilling, disturbing horror show, delivered with a sneer and a smile.
“Euphoria,” which premièred in 2019, had been on hiatus since its second season ended in 2022. But the lengthy break in its production—chalked up, variously, to the Hollywood strikes, the death of one of the show’s stars, and the rumored tensions among some of its young actors —has done nothing to dilute the essence that has distinguished the series from the very beginning.
If anything, that essence has been amplified. “Euphoria” is a big, vulgar, carnivalesque thing—an extreme, often-disgusting vision of a rapacious, pitiless America where everyone is fighting for scraps before Empire finally collapses and God turns off the lights. If you’re looking for finely drawn characters who change, develop, and form strong and meaningful bonds with one another in a conventional sense-making way, you’ve arrived at the wrong place. But if you’re here, instead, to shriek and laugh and shiver at the spectacle? Well, then, come on in. I’ll admit that I might be overstating the nihilistic unfeelingness of “Euphoria” in its first two seasons. It began, after all, as a teen show , and though it portrayed the kind of terrifying kids whose knowledge of Schedule II drugs and kinky sex could rival that of the most hardened Larry Clark subject, there was still some malleability at play, even some hope, which suited its protagonists’ youth. Rue, played by the former Disney child star Zendaya, was the show’s opioid-addicted narrator, serving as a tour guide to her and her friends’ life in the fictional Southern California suburb of East Highland. There was Nate , a hot, rich, violent jock; his wrong-side-of-the-tracks girlfriend, Maddy ; her frenemy, the Barbie-esque, desperate-for-love Cassie ; Cassie’s sister, the uptight Lexi ; Rue’s friend and sometimes lover, the arty trans girl Jules ; and a sympathetic drug dealer, Fezco. In between the high drama and extreme situations that these often-numbed-out kids found their way into—rough sex, vicious girl fights, armed drug deals, operatically hellish withdrawals—there were interludes of quiet and introspection. And even though “Euphoria” was never a show that dealt with characters’ psychology that deeply or consistently, it had some moments of real feeling. Visually, too, “Euphoria” had something of the lava lamp about it, all shadows and sparkle and swirling, glinting lights. The show’s suburban teen environment was less “The O.C.” and more “Carrie”—a space of trippy, oozing, horror-fantasy—and the much-talked-about makeup looks of its girl protagonists added to this impression. Dripping glitter, shimmering adhesive crystals, dramatic slashes of eyeliner and smudges of eyeshadow—there was a playful, shifting experimentalism here, to signal the young characters’ changeability and ingenuity. Season 3 transports us five years after the events of the second season, to a new stage in our protagonists’ lives. Rue and the gang are now adults in their early twenties, and, as she deadpans at the top of the first episode, “A lot of people ask what I’ve been up to since high school. Honestly? Nothing good.” Indeed. So-called real life has now begun, the characters have hardened with it, and the series, too, feels as if it’s clicked into its final, hardened form: a thrilling, disturbing horror show, delivered with a sneer and a smile, and portraying a world where money is the only thing worth caring about. Rue has been unable to repay the extraordinarily large sum of money that she owes the suburban drug boss Laurie , and so she begins working for her as a mule, travelling down to Mexico, where she swallows gumball-size balloons of fentanyl, helped down the gullet with a hefty squeeze of K-Y Jelly, and shat out into a sieve once back in Cali. Cassie and Nate, meanwhile, are engaged to be married, living in what Rue describes as a “right-wing suburban bubble.” Like Rue, Nate is in debt, owing money to shady figures who have sunk funds into the construction business he took over from his pervy father, Cal. Now, he’s focussed on the development of Sun Settlers, “the premier end-of-life transition facility in California.” Cassie is trying to become social-media famous, suggestively flashing her all-American assets online in a variety of fetishy costumes . Her aim is to make enough money to afford the fifty-thousand-dollar wedding floral arrangements that Nate is reluctant to cough up the dough for. Jules, meanwhile, has become a sugar baby, dropping out of art school to live a life of brittle luxury in a downtown L.A. penthouse, paid for by a wealthy plastic surgeon, who is enamored of her “poreless” skin—the result, he presumes, of her transitioning before puberty—and who tells her that her breasts are “near-perfect.” And Maddy is an assistant at a talent-management company who sees opportunities in the growing market of OnlyFans starlets. “We can imply nudity,” she reassures one model who’s reluctant to go full porn. “Sideboob, underboob, camel toe, a little ass cheek, feet. . . . We’ll build it up, a toe at a time.” Everyone, in other words, can be sold—or can sell oneself—for parts. The body is not a source of strength or pleasure or play but a site from which to grab as much power as one can and hold on to it for dear life. When Rue meets one of Laurie’s customers, Alamo , a strip-club mogul fond of cowboy hats and the American frontier as an organizing metaphor, the everything-is-for-sale theme is amplified further. “Pussy? That thing between your legs? Got a mystic power,” he tells her. “So, I figured I’d stand me right by some pussy with my cash register. Ka-ching!” Rue takes to this teaching like the Torah, ogling the girls grinding for bills with a fervor that mimics that of a religious revelation. The strip club—“fully nude, always lewd”—is, she imagines, her “little slice of heaven,” and by the start of the second episode, she has secured a new job there. There’s been some talk recently about the rightward turn in American entertainment, engineered to cater to Trump’s America. Taylor Sheridan’s TV shows , the sexed-up Texas drama “The Hunting Wives,” and even reality series like “Members Only: Palm Beach” and “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” all flirt with MAGA aesthetics and politics. Levinson certainly likes to poke fun at performatively woke ideology: this season, Lexi is an assistant on a nighttime soap, whose showrunner, played by Sharon Stone, explains self-importantly to her writers that if they “get 712 together,” they might even affect “what do at the ballot box.” He also skewers any number of liberal positions, from gun control to feminism. Rue, who sells arms to some of Alamo’s clients, cheerily assures us that most of the weapons she’s peddling are “headed to Mexico.” And between Cassie’s photo-shoot shenanigans—Sweeney herself, of course, has become a right-wing fan favorite—and the many, many male-gaze-centered strip-club scenes, this season is Levinson’s most “Girls Gone Wild”-coded yet. But unlike, say, Sheridan, who is interested in offering the down-home, traditional values of the Southwest as a positive alternative to coastal-élite liberalism, there’s no real upside to the debauched, unbridled world that Levinson presents. What Rue thinks might be her little slice of heaven actually becomes much closer to hell: a stripper named Tish overdoses on the traces of fentanyl in a dose of ecstasy she takes—likely the very same fentanyl Rue brought in her guts from Mexico to repay her debt; another stripper, spiralling into addiction after Tish’s death, is sent by Alamo to a dubious rehab facility, which looks more like a trafficking hub. In the season’s third episode, Cassie and Nate finally marry, and their technicolor suburban fantasia—fifty-grand floral arrangements and all—descends into a nightmarish bloodbath, when one of Nate’s lenders comes to exact his revenge, pounding Nate’s pretty-boy face into a pulp against the couple’s gaudy yellow carpet as Cassie shrieks self-pityingly. No happy trad wife she. The hysterically, cartoonishly violent look and tenor here is very Brian De Palma’s “Scarface” meets Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers.” And indeed, this season is the show’s most cinematic yet, with Levinson trying on different American auteur hats, taking us from epic, John Ford-like vistas of the American West, against which Rue is dwarfed on her drug-smuggling missions, to Michael Mann-style images of Los Angeles at night, overlooked by Jules’s penthouse, all set to a score composed by Hans Zimmer. Just as these directors did, each in his own way and in his own time, Levinson is looking to engage with what America is, exactly. And let me tell you: right now, it’s really not looking great. ♦
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