Euphoria is our last good TV show
Without it, TV is all slop.
What’s harder: stanning the work of Sam Levinson, or scaling Mt. Everest? To be an out and proud stan of the Euphoria creator’s work is to be partial to the special tang of hot trash left out in the sun, sucking on the bag long enough to find sweetness in its juices. He is both an anarchist and, in some ways, a genius. A ragebait master. His catalog is so comprehensive that there’s even a barometer of quality within his flops. Malcolm & Marie? Bad bad. The Idol? Good bad.
Everyone had already bundled the new season of Euphoria into the flop category before it had returned. When its third outing was announced, the internet was furious: “Euphoria is DONE… fans are tired,” vloggers wrote. Teen Vogue questioned “Does the Euphoria Cast Even Want a Season Three?”
I was always under the impression that nobody really meant this. After all, we’d been left in the lurch for nearly half a decade, and we’d adored what had come before. There’s also the unavoidable fact that its entire cast have since become our favorite A-list movie stars. Didn’t we want to see them together for one last time?
Euphoria is fun to hate because it asks us to hate it: It’s loud and astringent and teeters on the edge of bad taste, often diving into it without giving a fuck. To me, the first three episodes of season three are a summation of the greatest American art: freewheeling, violent, garish—as fucked up as its country of origin. It feels like a final chapter— Zendaya herself said so. But more importantly it feels like Levinson’s histrionic doorslam on two decades of prestige TV.
Back in 2019, Euphoria entered the culture at the epicenter of our rediscovered desire to watch ambitious storytelling at home. Streaming helped. Stranger Things was pulling in big audiences on Netflix. On cable, Game of Thrones had enthralled audiences on a scale previously seen only in movie theaters, coming to an end earlier that year. It had been a while since we had been able to enjoy shows that felt compelling and well crafted (The Wire and The Sopranos were firmly a part of HBO’s past) but it was time for it. Everyone was bingeing streaming shows and the pandemic was just around the corner. TV was getting good again: Succession, Shogun, The Last of Us, Squid Game, The Crown. Euphoria, too, felt like an important part of its fabric.
But we’re looking back on that moment rather than living through it, which is why the ostentatiousness of the new Euphoria feels so notable. Amidst a celluloid boom in movies, it’s the first TV show in history to be shot on both 35mm and 65mm film, apparently to mirror its characters’ journeys “into the wider, wilder world.” The score, once provided by Labrinth, comes courtesy of Hans Zimmer, who won an Oscar for Dune, for fuck sake. You can feel it: that textural, aesthetic, sonic upgrade. It feels more expensive than ever.
HBO have leant into this leveling up in their presentation of it. The show was aired early to journalists in New York on cinema screens. One of its big marketing moments was a broadcast from the grounds of Coachella, where it was beamed directly into the eyes of those who had made it so successful in the first place: a generation who romanticized self-destruction, just as millennials had with Skins a decade before Euphoria debuted.
This showyness doesn’t come at the shallow expense of the story, though. I’d argue that quality has always been a key part of what made the show so special. It was made for an audience of aesthetes who love Tumblr screenshots of sexy people. But this time around, Levinson’s sexy people are going through their own shit at polar opposite ends of society’s spectrum. You have the murky world of addicts, making ends meet through nefarious means, and new faux-riche mansion dwellers. Agents to OnlyFans models and art students-turned-sugar babies. After dragging these kids through high school, the new Euphoria is proudly ignorant to the mundane middle classes. It’s a Mentos-and-Diet Coke show, frothing uncontrollably from every orifice, obliterating all that’s boring. I’m afraid it’s magic still works on me.
Levinson knows that we’re crying out for something like it—a show that dares to be grim, acidic, and original. We’ve reached the tail end of TV’s Golden Age, and he treats Euphoria as its last gasp. That pandemic-fueled streaming boom has led to a new era of stuff that feels like slop. We cannot name every show from the Star Wars and Marvel universes—there are so many. There are spin-offs of once successful properties, like Game of Thrones, but again they feel like paler versions of what we were once in love with, and we’re being told to treat them with the same kind of reverence. Just look at Harry Potter—a beloved film franchise (tarnished by its creator) that does not need to be retreaded. But here we are, so afraid of risk, that we’re being subjected to a decade of likely drab TV based on the same property anyway. We don’t need it, but people will watch it, and that’s enough for Warner Bros to spend an estimated billion dollars on its creation.
It feels like the death of something, but death now doesn’t mean death forever. I’m of the persuasion that certain kinds of culture die for the sole purpose of being brought back again when we’re primed and ready for it. Soon, I hope, a show as unafraid, unbothered, and controversial as Euphoria will burst through the fabric of television, obliterating the mush that will be season 6 of Harry Potter. I hope it’s not a Euphoria reboot, though. I’m craving a prestige freak made in its image.
You just witnessed Faye, Chloe Cherry’s character in Euphoria, chow down on golf ball-sized drug packets in the show’s first episode. Diva behavior!
I asked her: What historical diva deserved better?
Princess Diana. She was a just such an incredible person and good to the bottom of her heart. To this day, she's one of most important and influential people in government, and she would have made an even more positive impact on the world if she were alive today. She loved everyone, she wanted peace and safety, and stood up for what she believed in, even when the media and her own family disrespected her. We could use more people like her in government today.
Seeing everyone flock to Coachella is reminding me of my first music festival: a four-day camping trip to T in the Park in Perth, Scotland. I was 16, and saw 4 era Beyoncé, as well as Odd Future doing three songs before being kicked off stage for, from what I recall, throwing glass into the audience (or vice versa). <3
Erupcja hits US theaters next week, and I dug it. Felt like real indie cinema in a time when its aesthetics have been jacked by bourgeois filmmakers. Charli xcx’s performance is just one of many interesting things about it.
The Cannes line-up is out. Any questions?
