The third season of the HBO hit series Euphoria is here after four years. With just two episodes out, fans want it to be cancelled already.
The show’s creator, Sam Levinson, is himself responsible for the show’s downfall. In the earlier seasons, Euphoria depicted teenage chaos in a way that translated it into a feeling. It was messy, hypnotic, uncomfortable, and yet deeply human. Now, with its latest season, rather than the question “what happens next?”, we are left with “what the hell happened to it?”
Euphoria hit us in 2019 like a fever dream. It was a high of adolescence, addiction, desire, identity, and self-destruction stitched in mesmerising visuals and intimate storytelling. Narrated and anchored by Zendaya as Rue, the show built a fragile emotional ecosystem around characters played by Sydney Sweeney (Cassie), Jacob Elordi (Nate), Hunter Schafer (Jules), Alexa Demie (Maddy), Maude Apatow (Lexi), and Barbie Ferreira (Kat). Each of them once existed in shades of contradiction, each with grayness. They were all flawed, vulnerable, often unlikable, but always real.
But that was the essence of Euphoria, a show that plunged most of the cast into the spotlight. Because it made the audience connect.
Undoing of Euphoria
The first two seasons operated as character studies dressed as spectacle. The now iconic melancholy and dreamy visuals, shaped by the uncredited artist Petra Collins, weren’t just for aesthetic indulgence. They were storytelling devices. The glittering eye makeup, the neon shadows, and the surreal lighting choices were a direct reflection of the characters’ emotions. It was a masterclass in saying more without even saying anything.
And we cannot talk about Euphoria without talking about Labrinth’s music. He added soul to Euphoria’s characters. It was the show’s pulse. Whether it was his song ‘Formula’ or the amazing ‘All of Us’ or ‘Forever’ among the many amazing picks, his soundtracks elevated the scenes into something almost spiritual. The third season brings in the brilliant Hans Zimmer, but he doesn’t bring in the ‘sound’ that made Euphoria “Euphoria”. It created a new musical identity for the show, departing from the electronic-pop and R&B soul style Labrinth used in the previous seasons. With the sonic backbone also gone, the show’s rhythm feels lost, literally.
The characters who once carried moral ambiguity and emotional density now feel like flat archetypes of the people they once were. Cassie, once a study in longing, insecurity, and male validation, is now looking like a cardboard cutout trying too hard to reflect male fantasy. Levinson has made her a wannabe OnlyFans model who dresses up as a dog and a baby. It’s almost like the creator told AI to write a character based on Instagram trad wives. Nate’s psychological complexity and his obsession from earlier seasons are also diluted. Jules is now a sugar baby. And the Rue, the fragile axis of the show, once showing the ugly reality of teenage addiction, feels like a narrative placeholder.
So, you take away the aesthetic, the music, the characters’ essence, and what you’re left with is an overstuffed mess with no soul. It is provocative for the sake of it, far detached from the emotional core that once grounded it.
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Lacking soul and depth
There’s a shift in how sexuality is portrayed in the show. In the previous seasons, it was not used for shock value as much. It was uncomfortable but purposeful, used to interrogate power, and was tethered to self-worth. Now it feels less meaningful, simply feeding into fetishes. This is quite evident with Sweeney’s character, Cassie, roleplaying as a baby at a time when the world is freshly disgusted by the revelations of the Epstein files.
In many ways, Euphoria now risks being the very thing it critiqued, a spectacle without introspection. Like when satire becomes reality. And that’s where comparisons to The Idol (2023), also helmed by Levinson, start to make sense. Often dubbed as ‘torture porn’, that show, too, was criticised for leaning heavily into sexualisation while lacking emotional depth or narrative cohesion.
The real tragedy, however, isn’t that Euphoria has changed. We all know characters grow and transform, and so does the tonality of every show. It’s just that it has forgotten what it set out to do. Euphoria was about the teenage experience, when you feel the emotional weight with scathing intensity. It made you feel it too. And maybe that’s why audiences are upset. They are grieving the death of true artistic perversion.
It is the classic creative pitfall. Creators forget that substance precedes style. And when even that is lost, we’re left with the glossy carcass of a show that had all the potential and now just a lot of ‘what ifs’.
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(Edited by Ratan Priya)