Euphoria, the slick, explicit, high-budget teen drama halfway through its second season on HBO, has from the start been a soap layered in heady seriousness. The show, adapted by Sam Levinson from an Israeli series of the same name and co-produced by Drake, took on a near encyclopedia of Today’s Teen Issues – sex shaming, drug addiction, body insecurity, web personas, revenge porn, pregnancy and abortion, emotional abuse, toxic masculinity, self-harm and depression, and more – with a bracing, revelatory frankness and thick lacquer of gloss (and full-frontal nudity).
By its first season finale in 2019, in which main character Rue (Zendaya, who won an Emmy for the role) nearly dies in a graphic drug overdose, Euphoria had drawn a legion of fans (the finale drew 1.2 million night-of viewers and became HBO’s second-most tweeted-about series ever, behind Game of Thrones) and managed to balance shock with sensitivity. It established beloved characters – in particular the fragile, alchemical bond between Rue and Jules (Hunter Schafer), a trans character – as well as a distinctive visual palette: saturated color, shimmery beats, high-voltage fantasy, meta narration, a zeitgeist-aiming show with a small hint of irony and a large dollop of excess.
The long-anticipated second season, which premiered in January and opened with a brash, 10-minute, Scorsese-style sequence on drug dealer Fezco’s (Angus Cloud) gun-toting criminal grandmother (played by The Sopranos’ Kathrine Narducci), has leaned even more to that excess, to a divisive degree. The ratings are up – 10.3 million people have watched the season premiere, and this week’s episode was up 41% from the week before – but reception is mixed. Online reactions toggle chaotically between sincere enjoyment and hate-watching or, for many, something inarticulably in between. The chasm between real high school (boring) and Euphoria high school (increasingly unhinged) has become distractingly vast, a joke turned into its own TikTok meme on its peacocking fashion. Whereas the first season felt like submerging, high, in a warm bath of high-school memories shot through with glitter, dialed up to 11, and distorted in a funhouse mirror, the second season – self-indulgent, luridly violent, still lush, expensively soundtracked – has taken on the feeling of a chore. Euphoria feels stuck – a stressful, self-conscious drag.
Take, for instance, one of its signature fantasy sequences early in this season’s third episode, in which Rue delivers a monologue on her character’s wearying relapse with drug addiction, a downward spiral that has tested fans’ morale and provided one half of the season’s loose amalgamation of plot. “As a beloved character that a lot of people are rooting for, I feel a certain responsibility to make good decisions,” she says to the camera, pointer in hand, miming a schoolteacher instructing on the ABCs of hiding a relapse from friends and family. “Now, in all fairness, I did say from the beginning that I had no intention of staying clean. But I get it. Our country’s dark and fucked up and people just want to find hope. Somewhere. Anywhere. If not in reality, then in television.
“Unfortunately,” she adds, without apology, “I’m not it.” It’s a fascinating meta moment – Levinson explaining, via Rue, why he’s testing the limits of her likability; the show itself acknowledging that it’s not really successful escapism, nor trying to be. It also feels like an admission of viewers’ fatigue with Rue’s addiction, which has drawn the season into near gang movie territory. Euphoria, like its floundering main character, has shirked the teen plot.
This is not to complain that Euphoria is ridiculous, because ridiculousness is part and parcel of the teen soap genre, of which this show, despite its HBO pedigree, is a part. It’s probably best summarized, as the writer Molly Lambert put it, as “just A24 Degrassi”. (A24, the independent entertainment company behind such stylized, visually saturated features as Spring Breakers, Moonlight, Midsommar and Uncut Gems, also produces Euphoria.) It shares many tried and true staples of shows like Dawson’s Creek, One Tree Hill, The OC, Gossip Girl, Degrassi, Skins, Australian staples like Home and Away and Neighbours, including: an outsider who is still strikingly beautiful (in Euphoria, the second season character of Lexi, played by Maude Apatow); a love triangle involving a blonde and a brunette (Cassie, Maddy and Nate – the second season’s other contorted plot); at least one lost parent; uncontrolled house parties, obviously.
All of these beloved teen shows were powered by consistent, cyclical melodrama and sustained by an implicit suspension of disbelief (that older actors at all resembled pimply teens, that teens were either having no sex at all or incredibly good sex, etc.) Ridiculousness can be extremely entertaining, as in any of the aforementioned shows or even in unintentionally chaotic series such as Apple TV’s The Morning Show. But when not harnessed to character development, plot momentum, or narrative pay-off, it feels self-indulgent, grating, even flat.
Teen show violence isn’t unique to Euphoria – think a school shooting plot on Degrassi, that and more on One Tree Hill, even an ill-conceived murder-as-self-defense-from-rape plot-line on Friday Night Lights. But whereas those shows incorporated genuinely farfetched (and traumatic!) events for the sake of plot, suspense and drama, Euphoria increasingly appears to do so for the sake of aesthetics. The show has always toed the line between style and substance, and this season crossed into the former. An addict side character shooting up outside an LA suburbs motel, Rue strip-searched by a menacing dealer in a shower, Fezco pummeling Nate’s (Jacob Elordi) face, the camera lingering on the blood and crunch of his nose – all of it feels, in Euphoria’s lurid, hyper-real style, queasy and too much, explicitness spoilt to exploitation. The show is, by genre definition, ridiculous, but not in on the joke of its own excess.
There are parts of Euphoria that felt genuinely refreshing – a nuanced portrayal of one teenage girl’s (Kat, played by Barbie Ferreira) foray into the mazy morass of internet sex; the introduction of Jules (Schafer), a trans girl whose transness is neither the point of her character nor the source of her demons; the too often manic pixied Jules’s gravitational, consuming connection with Rue. The show’s at times unsparing and deglamorized handling of Rue’s addiction was refreshing if gutting; same, too, for its depiction of sex as a curious, high-stakes battleground between the girls and boys. Euphoria, at its best, approaches the concerns of today’s teens (and parents) with revelatory candor, even at its most laughably and delightfully outlandish. But this season has catered to its worst, bloodiest impulses – ones it could use some good old teenage soap to wash out.
