I remember scrolling through Instagram one day in 2019 and seeing a teaser on Zendaya’s page for an upcoming HBO series. I can picture a Gravitron spinning, a glimpse of each character, and an emotional Zendaya with red and blue lights hovering over her. It was the new provocative teen show, and in no way was my mom interested in watching it with me (even when I asked her to). 

So I ended up watching it…secretly—I was only 11 or 12 years old, and I knew better. It was 2019, and the wave of body positivity and the Target Pride Collection had someone like me excited to be a teenager in this time period. (I ended up fine, even with the slightly premature dose of HBO’s Euphoria.)  

The buzzwords that critics use to describe Euphoria include “intoxicating,” “visually dazzling,” “controversial,” and simply “over the top.” I never had a problem with the content of it—or rather, the plot line—but more the message it was giving the adults it was intended for.  

Euphoria was never a manifesto of the high school experience in America, and the fact that people looked at it as such clearly said something about how accurate the depiction was. I would hope its controversial predecessors like 13 Reasons Why didn’t sum up what it means to be a 21st-century teenager with a cell phone. Just because what HBO was showing the world was gritty and hard to look at didn’t mean it was an accurate representation of every teen’s experience, just someone’s.

Now that I’ve got the context out of the way, let’s talk about what this show does—well, did—for us. Its first season, love it or hate it, punched hard; at the very least, it’s hard to deny that it’s beautifully shot. Seeing topics like queerness, drug abuse, body issues, generational trauma, sex work, and a whole host of more being centered in front of us, as on the nose as humanly possible was both productive and scary—and I mean eye-opening, yet still rather uncomfortable. Both of those things, however, are good.  

A short synopsis of the main characters (keeping in mind that these are all teenagers):

• Rue (Zendaya), who just came back from rehab, battles sobriety in the face of her family and death of her father
• Jules (Hunter Schafer), a trans girl, hooks up with older men from dating services while being underaged, and entangles herself in an extremely degrading relationship
• Cassie (Sydney Sweeney), the popular girl, faces leaked pictures of herself posted online, a traumatic abortion, and an absent Father
• Kat (Barbie Ferreira), battling with her own body issues, begins a side gig by chatting with men online and showing herself off to them
• Nate (Jacob Elordi), the football champ, wrestles with his dad’s disturbing double life and his own anger issues and abusive tendencies
• Maddy (Alexa Demie), who dates Nate, struggles with her abusive relationship with him

There’s more, but, to give an overall jist, these characters were once incredibly deep.

In 2020, Zendaya scored an Emmy Award for her lead role in the first season, and with a change of pace with the pandemic, the show’s intimacy hit a new peak. With two special episodes surrounding Zendaya and Hunter Schafer’s characters dropping during the winter of 2020, we were reminded of why this show spoke so deeply to us. For me, these are some of the best episodes I’ve ever seen on television.

Season 2 ended up coming in January of 2022; I was a few months away from starting high school myself, and I started to notice things. The first episode was pretty magnificent, which is not new for the standard they set with their freshman season, but throughout the weeks following, you could see the characters’ plot lines starting to feel lazy, or, quite almost, gone. We see a career highlight from Zendaya at around the fifth episode, yet the emotional pull that this show once possessed felt a little lost. Peaking from a pop culture relevance standpoint, Season 2 worked, but it was not the audacious show it once was. While still as controversial as ever, those elements weren’t what made up the core of the show—it was really its heart.

Four years later and I just picked up my cap and gown to graduate high school, but don’t worry, Season 3 of Euphoria has officially begun airing so life feels whole again (I guess?).

You would maybe think the formula would be perfected by its third go-around, but that’s really not the case. With a time jump both in the universe of Euphoria and my own universe, it seems like we’ve lost whatever this show was initially trying to say. Zendaya’s character is officially a drug mule swallowing balloons filled with fentanyl across the US border, Barbie Ferreira has left the show, Sydney Sweeney is dressed as a “sexy dog,” Alexa Demie works at a talent agency (clearly the easiest plot out of the bunch), and Hunter Schafer is now a sugar baby who dropped out of art school. The paths these characters have taken are as strange as ever. I almost can’t tell what feels true anymore, except for Zendaya’s character Rue, as she’s basically the last productive storyline.

Is this season good? I don’t entirely know. We’re five episodes in, and it seems like the audience is mostly turned off. With a recent episode surrounding a wedding, the stakes were raised, and it seemed like we were back to formula (like S2 Episode 1 – aka the New Year’s episode), yet nothing feels at all earned. It gets to a point where we question why we’re even here. An audience doesn’t want to be pulled along a story that’s not worth telling.  

We have the meat: drugs, violence, sex, etc., but we don’t have the story. One could argue it’s still entertaining or still stylistically matched or still well acted – all of these are things I could agree with, but what’s there to say? For a show that said a lot of things about the high school experience, all within the same radius, and that’s not to say they’ve necessarily forgotten its characters, this season feels almost like an afterthought. It reminds me a bit of the last couple of seasons of Stranger Things, where the characters felt like a Saturday Night Live sketch mocking who they once were. Clearly, we see this happening with the multiple-year-long gaps between seasons of shows, and the characters becoming less and less developed with time.  

To soften the blow, Zendaya holds the show together at about a 75% capacity. The other 25%, which I hate to admit, is probably held by Sydney Sweeney. I love to see Hunter Schafer paint portraits and Alexa Demie gaze at the camera every twenty minutes, yet it feels like a reminder of why Barbie left the show in the first place. There’s no more room for Maddy’s vulgar one-liners, and there’s definitely no more room for an episode diving into the complex relationship between Jules’ gender and search for sexuality. Maybe this is a bit bitter of me, but I would trade Cassie and Nate’s screen time over anybody else in the show. While we get the best out of Sydney Sweeney with her wailing on the floor in a wedding dress, we are not compelled anymore, and that’s the underlying issue. We see Sam Levinson (the writer-director of Euphoria) reheat Kat’s (Barbie Ferreira’s character) OnlyFans-esque plot line for Cassie with this season, and it feels incredibly overdone and uncomfortable. However, with last week’s episode starting with a Godzillaified Sydney Sweeney walking around Downtown LA in a leopard print catsuit (an outfit choice we’ve seen maybe four times already this season), I couldn’t help but admire how bizarre this show has gotten.  

While we’re only three quarters done with this season, the future of Euphoria feels dire. It’s a special show, and with 20 million viewers, it’s clear that it will remain a hit regardless, but at what cost? A million-dollar TikTok edit? I sure hope not.