Early in Euphoria’s newest season, a whisper of a young woman walks down a crowded street in Mexico. She has swallowed several tiny bags of powdered fentanyl, each so-called balloon ingested painfully with the help of a bottle of cheap lubricant. As Rue (played by Zendaya) narrates that these balloons need to stay intact, the woman collapses. The next scene finds her dead, a mess of balloons piled next to her.
Welcome back to TV’s most disturbing show—sort of. The HBO drama about disaffected Gen Zers has never been an easy watch, but its latest season is working overtime to provoke viewers. Set five years after the events of the Season 2 finale, Season 3 of Euphoria has brought back the bulk 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 local drug queenpin. Nate (Jacob Elordi) has taken over the family construction business and is in dangerous financial trouble; Cassie (Sydney Sweeney), his aimless stay-at-home wife-to-be, finds work humiliating herself on OnlyFans; and both Maddy (Alexa Demie) and Lexi (Maude Apatow) are toiling away as Hollywood assistants. Adulthood, according to Euphoria, is a miserable exercise in futility—a bleak experience in which nobody actually grows up.
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That nihilism proves to be a weak foundation for a show otherwise well positioned to reinvent itself after more than four years off the air. Unlike other teen dramas, Euphoria was never concerned with the traditional growing pains of young adulthood. Instead, its first two seasons depicted extremely mature, often distressing moments—a high schooler having sex with an older man, a shoot-out that ends in the death of a child, a flashback to Rue overdosing. Its hypnotic cinematography added a surreal sheen, heightening its examination of kids inundated with hypersexualized social media and constant anxiety-inducing news. But Euphoria also provided glimmers of real hope for their future. Its ensemble’s turbulent inner lives shifted through their relationships: Rue’s budding romance with her classmate Jules (Hunter Schafer) in particular anchored the story, keeping it from devolving into a seductive collage without substance.
But Season 3, of which I’ve seen the first three episodes, is mostly just well-shot pictures. The camerawork is still beautiful: As Rue makes her way across the border after a drug run, the screen fills with breathtaking images of desert sunsets and wide-open spaces. Otherwise, the series comes off as a shadow of its former self, unable to justify following each protagonist on their wildly different post-high-school journeys. Scenes of Rue being mentored by Alamo (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), a ruthless strip-club owner, seem disconnected from those of Nate arguing with Cassie about why she’s dressing up as a sexy puppy, which in turn feel irrelevant to a sequence of Lexi driving her boss around a studio lot. Rue’s ever-present voice-over, in which she muses about faith, the directionlessness of her peers, and the difficulty of striking it rich, does little to hold the story together. Everyone on Euphoria may be struggling, but none of them seems to need anyone else for help.
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The constant gestures toward issues plaguing Gen Zers also feel empty. Early episodes incorporate footage from the coronavirus pandemic; Jules declares that she rejects monogamy while on a date; Maddy monologues about how she’s nothing like the rest of her age group because, she says, “I believe in capitalism.” These moments appear designed to be clipped for social media, turning the cast members into mouthpieces for snappy quips mocking their generation. And as other parts of Euphoria descend into crime-novel clichés, the show muddies what always seemed to be its central conceit: using its provocations to examine how these traumatized young people make sense of the world around them.
Then again, Euphoria’s creator, Sam Levinson, who based some of the ensemble’s turmoil on his own teenage experiences, has said that his approach isn’t “anthropological.” His interest, he told The Hollywood Reporter last month, was in portraying “individuals,” not an entire demographic, and he was looking forward to the “very exciting” ways the characters could mature out of high school. The third season certainly offers thrills, mostly in the form of a parade of celebrities: Guest actors include Rosalía, Sharon Stone, and Marshawn Lynch. But their collective star power can’t mask how little insight Euphoria’s storytelling offers into the way its characters are processing their 20s.
As I watched, I often thought of Industry, another scandalous HBO drama that evolved significantly in its latest outing. On that show, the major investment bank the young protagonists worked for closes, leaving the tight-knit group scattered and prompting a major cast member to exit the series. Industry has thrived in its reinvention, however, in large part because it expanded its scope beyond the trading floor and challenged its characters’ beliefs about wealth and power. Euphoria doesn’t interrogate how the passage of time has affected its ensemble—why and how they’ve changed, beyond the job titles and social status they’ve acquired. If anything, the ensemble now resembles caricatures of scandalous 20-somethings. The fragile world that Euphoria built—a world that improbably balanced the shocking with the heartfelt—has collapsed.
The post Why Can’t Euphoria Grow Up? appeared first on The Atlantic.
