By Vivien Nguyen
In 2019, Season 1 of Euphoria graced our screens and became an overnight global sensation. Drenched in violet, haze and glitter, the show was a surreal, deeply empathetic look at Gen Z addiction, identity and grief. It was messy, indulgent, and occasionally frustrating, but it always felt emotionally sincere. But this year, Euphoria came back with something unrecognisable. Viewers waited more than four years to be served cowboys, neo-Nazis, shoot-outs and BBLs–a bewildering deviation from the show that they had fallen in love with, one that feels incomplete and disconnected from its own legacy. But how and why did this happen? Sam Levinson lost sight of the story he was telling, choosing to use HBO’s budget to bankroll a self-indulgent white-male-fantasy project, all whilst corrupting characters beloved by many and fetishising the suffering of his cast.
Levinson’s American Dream
This season opened with main character Rue working as a drug mule to pay off her debt to neo-Nazi drug lord Laurie. After a deadly incident involving fentanyl-laced drugs, she is recruited by pimp Alamo Brown after surviving a “test of faith”, where he places an apple on her head and shoots it off. What follows feels less like a continuation of Euphoria than a migration into an entirely different genre, leaving our protagonist navigating the underbelly of the American drug trade, racialised cartel feuds and managing a strip club, all while searching for a forgiveness and salvation that lies just outside of her reach–all of this, at the expense of the intimate character work that once defined the series. Meanwhile, Nate Jacobs–once one of television’s most unsettling antagonists–is transformed into a strangely passive figure, stripped of much of the volatility and menace that made him compelling in the first place. The genre shift is bizarre. It seems that Levinson wanted desperately to direct a gritty American Western about Manifest Destiny, yet rather than creating a new project, Levinson grafted those ambitions onto an existing one. Resulting in a show constantly at war with itself, torn between the once intimate emotional realism and grander fantasy that allowed the creator to fulfil his own Tarantino cosplay.
This shift catalysed the complete corruption of the characters who must now be twisted to fit a new, unrelated narrative. Rue is stripped of her softness and sensitivity, leaving behind a bumbling pervert that seemingly lacks a single shred of self preservation. Maddy and her motivations are flattened, like a cat that’s been declawed. Nate is now a cuck, for lack of better phrasing. Cassie devolves further into MAGA Barbie, losing everything that made her sympathetic. And most egregiously, Jules is relegated to little more than a decorative princess doomed to an eternity of painting in barely-there dresses and sleeping with her sugar daddy. It is undeniable that Levinson is one hell of a director, but his writing increasingly reveals a recurring limitation: an inability to sustain interest in perspectives outside his own. He uses and discards his characters the moment he no longer can relate to them (see Kat and McKay from Season 1) and so anyone who cannot fit neatly into his new cartel/Western fantasy gets sidelined or flattened into an archetype.
The Spectacle of Women’s Suffering
Levinson has a fascination with the female condition and has shown himself capable of exploring it. In Season 1 and 2, he depicted the complexities of coming of age and girlhood, of navigating the complexities of love, femininity and friendship and of seeking liberation and autonomy in a patriarchal society. However, it appears he is incapable of doing this, without projecting his own male gaze onto the actors themselves. More than just flattening the characters we know and love, Levinson fetishises the women and marginalised groups in his work. This season, all of the major characters are given storylines involving sex work, OnlyFans and adjacent occupations. This meant more nudity. My criticism does not lie in the presence of the nudity, but rather in how the nudity is portrayed. In Euphoria, the camera lingers. It leers. It consumes the feminine object, in turn encouraging the viewer to consume too. The vulnerability of the women feels like something that the viewer is entitled to – something they’re owed. Montages of Sydney Sweeney posed in various fetish play, strip club montages, extended tracking shots of almost naked strippers and let’s not forget the giant Cassie sequence where audiences got a close up of Sweeney’s entire chest pressed up against a high-rise window.
Beyond this, there seems to be a careful intention to highlight women’s suffering. In the first episode, Levinson does not shy away from depicting in graphic detail the exact nature of Rue’s work. Viewers are shown Zendaya and Chloe Cherry (Faye) swallowing (forcing) drug balloons to smuggle across the border. This scene was long, grisly and complete with lube, gagging, spitting and eyes watering. In interviews, Levinson stated it was to depict the gruesome reality of the drug trade, however I think the real answer is much more simple. There seems to be a growing sense that trauma has become his default narrative tool. The suffering of women and marginalised bodies is treated not as a human experience to explore, but as a beautiful, cinematic spectacle to be consumed. The only reason the show still retains a heartbeat is because of the immense talent of its mostly female cast. It is these women, mostly from marginalised identities that breathe life, humanity, substance and beauty into Levinson’s shallow scripts. But even that was not enough to save an already sinking ship.
The Death of the Aesthetic
The final nail in the coffin arrived long before the season premined. When Labrinth announced his departure from Euphoria and was replaced by legendary Hans Zimmer, viewers were left wondering how a new sonic direction would impact the show. Surely things would be safe with Zimmer. However, no one could have been prepared for a complete aesthetic shift.
The Euphoria audiences first encountered was ethereal and effervescent. Every frame was wallpaper-worthy and drenched in colour and glitter. This situated the show in a surreal, dreamlike space that felt both timeless and timely, in a way that emphasised all the messy, vibrant things that actually make us human. This season is grounded in Trump’s America. Crucially, Euphoria’s original aesthetic was never merely decorative. It reflected the interior lives of its characters, the heightened visuals mirrored heightened emotions. This season abandons much of that visual language. Colour is drained, glitter disappears and retro Americana replaces youthful experimentation. Cassie is a guest on podcasts elucidating on the plight of men in America. There is a strange, contradictory rise of conservatism and “trad wife” values that is at odds with the sex work storylines. By grounding this season in a specific, ugly modern reality that mirrors a contemporary shift towards conservative values, the show has lost interest in the raw, honest and sometimes ugly complexities of the human condition.
In spite of all this, the season was scattered with brilliant and beautiful moments that held emotional weight, but felt out of place amongst the hypermasculine tropes taking place. In episode 7, Rue is in a church when she gets a call from her mother, and in the conversation that ensues we see Rue crumbling under her own guilt, shame and fear–fear of disappointing the people she loves again, fear of trying again, fear of living up her potential. It is with her death (murder?) that audiences and the characters around her are forced to reckon with the tragedy of wasted potential. Much like the show itself. This season, Levinson stifled the beating heart of Euphoria to satisfy his own desires. Euphoria is a lesson in the “auteur myth” – it is what happens when a single white man is given unchecked power and resources to abandon a show’s thematic core in favour of personal indulgence.
