There’s a scene early on in the new, breathlessly anticipated third season of Sam Levinson’s Euphoria where Sydney Sweeney’s sickly sweet Cassie and Alexa Demie’s razor-sharp Maddy reunite. Cassie is now a bored California housewife-to-be, dabbling in OnlyFans for extra money for her blowout wedding, and Maddy a promising talent agent with a nose for spotting clients who can make her a killing. Cassie tells Maddy that if more people knew her, she could be huge. Maddy replies that Cassie might currently just be a big fish in a small pond. Cassie grins. “But, what if I was a big fish in a big pond?”
That is, broadly, the ambition of this next instalment of the HBO behemoth. There’s a five-year time jump from the previous season—which dropped over four years ago, if you can believe it—and our beloved heroes, anti-heroes and villains have all now been unleashed from the confines of high school.
They’re scattered across the West Coast: Zendaya’s Rue is on the nation’s southern border, doing drug runs in and out of Mexico alongside Chloe Cherry’s Faye, in an effort to pay her debts to terrifying king pin Laurie (Martha Kelly). Meanwhile, Hunter Schafer’s Jules is a painter moonlighting as a sugar baby; Jacob Elordi’s Nate an eager young developer engaged to Cassie; and Maude Apatow’s Lexi a Hollywood assistant to a prolific showrunner (Sharon Stone).
This is a more sweeping, sprawling story told on a giant canvas and, in a way, it makes perfect sense that Levinson chose to go in this direction. Euphoria has been a culture-shifting phenomenon since its debut back in 2019, and remains one of its network’s most-watched shows—so, why not expand its world and show us where these compelling characters end up?
Then, there’s also the matter of logistics: Euphoria was renewed for a third season in 2022, with production set to kick off the following year, but this timeline was disrupted by everything from the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes to substantial rewrites. At one point, it was put on hold and seemed at risk of being abandoned altogether. But then, Levinson appeared to have settled on a storyline the studio was on board with (after a number of false starts), and had managed to bring this all-star, in-demand cast back together. How could he possibly pass up the opportunity to make another season, given its immense success? And with this time lost and his actors now in their late twenties, what else could he do but take them out of high school?
All of which to say, I get it—and, in the first three episodes of the new season, which have been shared with critics, there’s a lot to like. The frenetic pace, the rat-a-tat editing, the deadpan voiceovers, the pitch-black humour, the masterful acting, the eye-popping visuals…everything you loved about Euphoria is still intact. But, removed from the intimacy and structure of high school, it sometimes feels a little meandering and lost in its big new world, as if unsure of what to focus on. I totally understand why a third instalment was made but, so far at least, I’m yet to be fully convinced that it needed to be.
Still, the opening episode is a corker. Rue’s adventures as a drug mule are both horrifying and blisteringly funny, walking a tightrope which Levinson has always navigated expertly. And Zendaya, as to be expected really, is fantastic, slipping effortlessly under the skin of the gruff addict in recovery, trying to claw her way out of an increasingly deep hole. Her earliest moments in the show have shades of a western—No Country For Old Men with a side of devout Trump supporters, sniffer dogs, petrifying cronies, and balloons stuffed with fentanyl and swallowed with lube. It works remarkably well, and is a reminder of why Euphoria, at its gruesome, gleeful, no-holds-barred best, can knock it out of the park as convincingly as it does.
Rue is in search of a deus ex machina, an escape from Laurie’s tyranny, and she finds it in the form of Alamo Brown (a swaggering Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje). The owner of a string of popular strip clubs, she meets him while on a delivery for her domineering boss, and he offers her a different life, working for him instead. In accepting, she’s sure to incur Laurie’s wrath, but, at this point, what other choice does she have?
This first episode ends on a gasp-inducing stomach drop, but the next two, at least in my assessment, don’t quite live up to its promise. Once we’re all caught up with the main characters, the pace sags and I found my attention drifting. It’s a joy to be reunited with Schafer, Demie, Elordi, Sweeney, Apatow et al in these layered, nuanced parts which made their name—to watch them fall in and out of love yet again, plot each other’s downfall, face long lost foes and look devastating while doing it. But, the gags, set pieces and dialogue soon begin to feel repetitive, as if Levinson is doing all he can to stretch events across his eight episode run.
Thus far, nothing comes close to the heart attack-inducing power of “Stand Still Like the Hummingbird”, last season’s standout episode, but, who knows: maybe this is just the build up, and it’s the next five episodes of the third season which will actually deliver the goods. Either way, if the question is, has Levinson done enough to keep the show’s millions of viewers watching, then the answer is a resounding yes. In the end, the sight of new guest star Rosalía as a stripper with a neck brace, which she needs to keep on while dancing in order to win a lawsuit, might alone justify the price of your HBO Max subscription.
It’s very likely that this will be Euphoria’s final season—and, honestly, it should be. I just hope they can land the plane—it deserves to go out on a high.
New episodes of Euphoria will air weekly on HBO Max.
