James Kirkham, a brand strategist and culture commentator, agrees that the themes that once made Euphoria feel culturally defining are now more mainstream.
“The cultural conversation they were having in 2019 about identity, queerness, mental health, is now the conversation everyone is having everywhere, so the show no longer feels like a frontier.”
He believes the sheer speed of online culture has fundamentally changed how audiences engage with youth-focused television.
“The four-year gap is the real culprit because in social media and streaming time, four years is like a seismic or geological shift, so audiences who fell for season one as sixth formers are now graduates.”
Kirkham also says internet culture itself has fragmented since Euphoria’s early seasons, making it harder for any one television show to dominate in the same way and “community on social media now barely exists in any meaningful collective sense”.
Comparisons have frequently been drawn between Euphoria and Skins, the youth-focussed series that became hugely influential in the 2000s before later seasons struggled to maintain the same cultural relevance.
Kirkham says it is almost inevitable that modern youth dramas will lose relevance over time and “the miracle is when a youth show catches fire even once”.
“Expecting it to do it twice, in different cultural weather, with the same writers, is always hard.”
