Euphoria Is a Monument to Sam Levinson’s Lack of Creativity

Photo: Patrick Wymore/HBO

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In Euphoria’s long-awaited third season, Rue is an arms dealer. Emmy winner Zendaya plays the scene like an enthusiastic YouTuber asking you to like and subscribe, all sunny smiles and overblown bravado as she shows off guns to potential buyers and describes their destructive capabilities. It’s a shock moment in a season full of them, most of which reduce characters to bodies for debasement and scintillation rather than means of storytelling — nipples coated in ice cream and cocaine, faces slick with blood, a dog licking the shit spilling out from a drug mule’s underwear. (Metatextually shocking: how thin all of these actresses have become.) And just like Rue’s transformation into an AR-15 salesperson, so much of this early phase of Euphoria’s return feels completely airless. As Euphoria’s creator, writer, and director, Sam Levinson wants to craft a show about the pervasiveness of fentanyl, the dangers of addiction, and the lawlessness of the American West. Instead, what he’s made — yet again — is a cannily shot phantasmagoria that’s as beautifully lit as it is emotionally hollow.

The many-years-sober Levinson drew from his experiences as an addict to shape Euphoria, but more important were his edgelord proclivities, which went from shading the story of how these high-schoolers lived to defining it. Euphoria eventually became less about Rue’s struggle to stay sober, Jules’s (Hunter Schafer) unique experience as a trans teenager, and Nate’s (Jacob Elordi) response to his father Cal’s (the late Eric Dane) furious temper, and more of a constant, tedious thumbing of its nose at skeptical audiences. The girls’ outfits got smaller, the characters’ infighting nastier, the criminal element more brutal, the camerawork flashier, the series’ balance of all this more tenuous. The season-two finale, in which Lexi (Maude Apatow) stages a play about her older sister Cassie’s (Sydney Sweeney) affair with Nate and betrayal of her best friend, Nate’s ex Maddy (Alexa Demie), was a meta bonanza, Euphoria winking at us by taking on its own reputation and maximizing its absurdities. But Lexi’s play, Our Life, inadvertently revealed how Euphoria is now defined almost entirely by artifice, and how Levinson’s writing has plateaued so much that all he can do is reference the series’ past instead of imagining its future.

The first three episodes of Euphoria (all that was provided to critics) prove that to be true. Four years have passed since season two, and five years in show time, but Euphoria and its characters are arrested in high-school thinking, caught in the same holding pattern and narrow worldview as before: the same romantic entanglements, the same petty grievances, the same juvenile views on love and success. If this were an intentional critique of how self-centered and performative Gen Z is, how all that screen time and American exceptionalism rotted their brains and kept them immature forever, maybe it would feel caustic, subversive. Yet Levinson only feints intermittently in that direction, and his greater failure is how thin these characters feel. Even if this whole thing were a mockery of the youth of today, it wouldn’t totally work because of how immaterial everyone is. Yes, Euphoria is now a thriller with Rue stuck in the middle of two warring crime lords, Nate in deep debt to a foreboding funeral director, and AA’s Christianity-influenced ideology inspiring the series’ overarching questions about second acts in American lives. (The season is, according to a letter Levinson wrote to critics, meant to “honor” the late Angus Cloud “and all the kids who weren’t offered a second chance.”) But the series’ genre switch is just a theatrical exercise, like Euphoria is putting on another play, this one against a Harmony Korine– and Quentin Tarantino–aping backdrop. Neither Levinson, nor his characters, have grown up.

Euphoria left off with a number of cliffhangers. Rue was in debt to drug dealer Laurie (Martha Kelly) after Rue’s mother threw out the suitcase of products Laurie had given her to sell. Rue and Jules’s romance was basically over after Rue’s relapse. Nate gave Jules the video Cal had secretly filmed of himself and then-underage Jules having sex for her to destroy, and then turned Cal into the police for his various sex crimes; Nate also broke up with Cassie after their affair was revealed in Our Life. And Lexi and softhearted drug dealer Fezco (Cloud) were going to have their first date at her play, but then Fezco’s house was raided by the police, and his younger brother and business partner, Ashtray (Javon “Wanna” Walton), who had just murdered an informant, was killed. In these three episodes of the new season, Rue’s customary narration explains how these characters — who seemed so ready to move on with their lives and never again think about East Highland High School — end up still tethered to one another. For the most part, that’s through Levinson rewinding whatever progress they might have made, meaning that Euphoria doesn’t have to push itself or its characters.

Rue is again working for Laurie, now as a drug mule traveling to and from Mexico and regularly packing her stomach with dozens of balloons of powder, to pay off her $100,000 debt. She’s still hanging out with Lexi and Maddy, close to Fezco (who is, despite Cloud’s death, alive on the show, serving 30 years in prison, and present on a one-sided phone call with Rue), and hung up on Jules. Rue actually says, “Man, I miss high school,” in case her actions somehow weren’t clear enough. Maddy is an assistant to a Hollywood manager, a job she got by insulting her generation (“I’m not a victim, I won’t be an HR nightmare, and I believe in capitalism”), but she’s still hurt by Nate choosing Cassie over her. Cassie and Nate got back together and are living in a gauche, Vegas-casino-style mansion in East Highland, where he took over his father’s construction company and she’s doing embarrassingly goofy kink videos for TikTok. Jules dropped out of art school to be a “sugar baby” for rich clients, in particular a plastic surgeon (Sam Trammell) whose mode of flirting with Jules is, when she brightly asks him about his preference to “fuck trannies,” to ask her if her parents know what she does for a living. (They do not.)

In these three hours, Euphoria is mostly just reassembling the board, explaining everyone’s lingering connections and building up to Nate and Cassie’s wedding. There are tense moments, sure: Rue and Faye (Chloe Cherry), their intestines slick from the Vaseline used to get drug balloons down, holding in their shit while a drug-sniffing dog loiters around their car at the Mexican border; strip-club magnate Alamo (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) questioning Rue about why she’s crashing a private party at his desert compound; a visit to a rehab center whose dim, shadowy interior suggests a new ring of hell. But even with the omnipresence of guns, cowboys, and heavy-handed dialogue about the destructive nature of the American spirit, the episodes are overly languid thanks to Rue’s painfully expository narration and the unresolved tension between the series’ familiar character dynamics and flashy new genre vehicle.

So much of this third season of Euphoria boils down to sex, money, and power as the only motivators for our American identity, and hey, I agree! But there’s little distinct ideology from Levinson about why that is, or how it would filter down to a generation like Gen Z. Levinson understands these themes through pastiche rather than singularity; visual metaphors that are either overly obvious (Rue walking alone through the California desert, bent under the weight of a duffel bag of drugs) or banter that’s overwritten or underbaked (Alamo complaining to his lackeys about being called a “pig” as a Black man). And pacing aside, the problem isn’t just that so many of these questions about America feel regurgitated from the likes of Korine, Tarantino, Bret Easton Ellis, Paul Schrader, and even Ryan Gosling’s directorial effort, Lost River. It’s that Levinson would rather revert to childish provocations of his audience — like a close-up shot of a pig’s asshole lazily defecating, or Cassie sucking on a pacifier, or Laurie’s relatives using racial slurs to describe Alamo — than challenge us to truly consider what forgiveness and grace would mean for someone as broken as Rue. Zendaya has a clear Emmy-submission scene in which she reckons with how her addiction has destroyed her life, estranged her from her family, and slid her into a criminal enterprise that she might never be able to get away from, a monologue that Zendaya plays with manic motormouthed energy and a faceful of tears. It’s a powerful sequence, but it’s memorable less for Zendaya’s individual strength as an actress and more because it’s the only time in these three episodes when a female character is given any glimpse of a hidden life.

Levinson loves to write a woman he can turn into a sex worker, costume in a thong, and position as the focus of a Terry Richardson–style soft-core-porn shoot — congratulations, now you don’t have to watch The Idol — but what is Euphoria saying about why women willingly subjugate themselves? When we watch Ellis constrain a half-nude Jules in plastic wrap so she’s practically straitjacketed before him, or Nate pull on Cassie’s leash while she’s dressed as a puppy for sale (déjà vu from Wuthering Heights), or Rue scope out the strippers dancing at the club she now manages, what’s being communicated about femininity, labor, and bodily autonomy? When we linger on a woman foaming at the mouth and overdosing from fentanyl, or when Rosalía shows up in a neck brace to play a stripper whose characterization is mostly just “loud Latina,” what insights is Euphoria offering about womanhood as a burden, an opportunity, a weight, or a joy? Is Euphoria critiquing violence against women and how they are treated first like dolls and then like trash, or is it merely perpetuating and parroting the pattern?

Levinson’s series has long trafficked as a kind of smutty after-school special, not unlike how Ryan Murphy delves into some of the nastiest gore imaginable and then chastises us for watching. Euphoria now tiptoes close to making a similar argument, one where its characters and their opinions are occasionally the butt of the joke — when Lexi haughtily scoffs at Rue’s interest in Christianity because believers are “judgmental,” or when a dead-eyed Cassie explains why she dresses up like a baby for paying customers (“If I don’t, someone else will. It’s just supply and demand”), or when Nate threatens to kill his housekeeper if she doesn’t stop listing all the leftover food from a barbecue that he’s ordered her to throw away. Moments that gesture at America’s prevailing culture as a corrupt, hypocritical thing that trickles down to infect everyone are a fascinating glimpse into what might be Levinson’s unfiltered thoughts on our collective psyche, but then he’ll cut to another shot of a female character being joyfully objectified, and the sense of Euphoria offering something deeper, something more insightful, collapses. Instead, this is Levinson putting into action the ideology he shared in his 2018 bomb Assassination Nation — that all of this adds up to little more than lulz.

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