When HBO’s Euphoria premiered in 2019, critics were equal parts entranced and horrified. Some praised creator Sam Levinson for his fresh take on the high-school drama genre, including its gritty portrayal of drug addiction; others questioned whether it was really necessary to hire 20-something actresses to play 16-year-olds, then repeatedly show their bare breasts onscreen (not an illegal creative choice, per se, but certainly a questionable one).

The acclaimed series definitely pushed boundaries, even if the primary one was how many times a viewer could ask: “Where the hell are these kids' parents? And do Californian high schools not have dress codes?” Still, with enough suspension of disbelief, Euphoria’s moments of genius writing and superb performances shined through. Which makes it all the more disappointing that after a five-year hiatus, the show has returned to our screens as an almost comically sexist parody of its former self. Six episodes in, and all of the female characters are either lobotomized or constantly brutalized. It’s as if the show not only hates all of its starring actresses, but all of its viewers too.

“What the hell happened?” fans have been asking. Did Levinson spend the last half-decade crawling through incel subreddits? Is he punishing fans for lambasting The Idol, his 2021 attempt at a Euphoria follow-up, which critics called “torture porn” and “the sleaziest show on television”? (As an aside: The Idol was co-written by The Weeknd, and was also filmed in his real-life mansion, making one of the funniest parts of the series how many times a beautiful woman says something like, Wow, this mansion is so cool! Whoever lives here must be really hot and rich!)

It’s not exactly clear what led Levinson to turn every female storyline into a humiliation ritual. But call it self-harm or morbid curiosity, I can’t seem to stop watching.

 

Euphoria's newest season opens several years after its troubled group of friends has graduated high school. Somehow, all but one of the six girls are now involved in sex work. Rue, played by Zendaya, has moved on from her role as an erratic drug addict to become a mostly-sober drug mule, and the manager of a strip club (in reality, she’s basically a sex trafficker). Her on/off love interest, Jules, played by Hunter Schafer, has recently quit art school and is now a “sugar baby,” exchanging soulless sex with a married man in return for free rent in his empty apartment.

At least Maddie, a fan favorite, appears to be climbing the career ladder as a celebrity manager assistant! Don’t hold your breath, though, because soon enough, the charismatic fashionista starts a new gig of managing and recruiting OnlyFans porn stars. And whatever became of the much-hated Cassie, played by the similarly-controversial Sydney Sweeney, who in real life has been busy selling her bathwater and facing accusations of endorsing eugenics? Cassie, of course, is now an OnlyFans “content creator” who sells custom videos sucking on her toes and pretending to be a sexy little puppy, or a sexy towering giantess.

It’s as if Euphoria director Sam Levinson literally can’t conceive of a woman doing any other job. Sure, if one character went the sex-work route after high-school, there’d be room for plausible deniability. But all of them?! Does Levinson know that we’re allowed to do other stuff? It’s an especially egregious writing choice considering that last season, one of the show’s stars—Barbie Ferreira—quit the series after Levinson sidelined her plot by turning her high-school-aged character into an online dominatrix. Exactly how common of a phenomenon does he think this is?

The show’s only female character who isn’t portrayed as exploiting herself or other women is Lexie, Cassie’s uptight little sister. Lexie is a shrewd workaholic trying to make her way in the cutthroat industry of script-writing, and of course, is also a virgin. (“It’s better than having herpes!” she hisses in the second episode.) Lexie is smart, hard-working, and basically asexual: the perfect foil to her sister’s vapid, big-bosomed bimbo-dom. The two of them read as if Levinson learned about the “Madonna-Whore Complex” and thought it sounded like a good idea for a character study.

Some of the season’s misogyny is so over the top that it’s almost funny. Just when you think there might be a plotline other than women be sluts, you’re zapped right back into reality.

Case in point: the newly-revealed backstory behind Alamo, one of the season’s most compelling new characters. Alamo is a crime boss who rules over his strip club empire with steel-toed cowboy boots, and Zendaya’s character falls into his orbit while delivering drugs to his club one night. After sticking around to flirt with the dancers, she bonds with him over their shared “love of pussy.” (Apparently, since becoming openly gay after high school, Rue has also turned into a huge sexist.)

Alamo is a drug-dealing mobster whose “girls” are his product, so it makes sense that he doesn’t treat women well. (Don’t worry: I’m not one of those TV-watchers who can’t distinguish between portrayal and endorsement. I didn’t accuse the writers of misogyny when Tony Soprano tried to have sex with his therapist, nor did I lambaste Breaking Bad every time Walter White was mean to his wife). In last week’s Euphoria episode, however, viewers were treated to a flashback that explains Alamo’s twisted nature—and you’ll never guess whose fault it is.

In past seasons, these recurring flashbacks gave insight into characters’ psyche, often adding a layer of empathy to otherwise irredeemable villains. In season one, we learned that the violent jock Nate (Jacob Elordi) was once a sweet and loving child—until he found aggressive home-made porn on his Dad’s computer, showing violent sex with much younger men and trans women. The following season, Nate’s Dad got a redemptive flashback of his own, revealing the gay heartbreak that left him incapable of love as an adult. Traumatic experiences can affect people for long after, Euphoria seemed to say, and even the worst characters have reasons for their actions.

Alamo’s backstory, however, simply falls in line with the rest of the season’s lazy writing. We learn that when Alamo was a young boy in the ’70s, his single mother began dating a man named Monk, whom she met at church. The man’s face had been disfigured in a workplace accident, and while the scars initially scared Alamo, Monk’s gentle demeanor soon won the little boy over. For one blissful summer, the three of them lived happily together—until a hefty settlement check arrived in the mail, finally compensating Monk for his injury.

Shortly after the money arrived, the new family came home one night to find their house completely ransacked. There had been a robbery. Poor Monk barely had time to glance around the empty apartment—cleared of all furniture, art, and whatever else—before Alamo’s mother grabbed her son by the hand and walked out, leaving him sobbing on the floor and holding his scarred face in his hands. (Can you see where this is going? Women be sluts!) It turns out that Alamo’s mother set up the whole crime, leaving a kind and generous man destitute before delivering all of his possessions to her real boyfriend: some other dude across town with a sexy, normal face.

“Oh, don’t give me that look,” she admonishes Alamo as they drive away. “He was so ugly. You weren’t the one who had to kiss him!” It’s meant to be sad, but the dialogue is so absurd and irrationally heartless, I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. The whole sequence reads like the angry fantasy of a scorned Nice Guy, paranoid that some greedy woman will steal all his money then abandon him for Chad down the street. In real life, this kind of Nice Guy typically uses this theoretical betrayal to justify his current, actual hatred of the women around him. But Alamo’s heartbreak was real—and therefore, the show seems to say, his hatred is justified.

“From that day on, Alamo vowed never to trust a bitch,” Euphoria’s narrator explains, just really hammering the point in, in case you didn’t get it. The scene flashes forward to present-day where the the scorned pimp is riding a galloping horse towards Rue, who is buried neck-deep in dirt, swinging a mallet in preparation for bashing her head in.

Euphoria’s overreliance on sex work as a trope could be forgiven if Levinson actually had something interesting to say. Why do women from various backgrounds go into the industry—and what is the meaningful difference between the girls working at Alamo’s club, and Cassie posing in front of a ring light in her bedroom? But the show isn’t about sex work, really, or even about the people who participate in it. Instead, Levinson seems more focused on brutalizing his characters just for the sake of it. In one particularly harrowing scene, a fresh-faced and newly hired dancer is working her first night at the club, when she’s taken back into a private room with several men. Rue watches the CCTV feed in horror as the men take turns raping the woman, even assaulting her with a glass champagne bottle. It’s not that rape isn’t a real threat for sex workers, or that Euphoria shouldn’t acknowledge it. But the scene is excruciatingly drawn out, unnecessarily graphic, and would have achieved the same shocking effect with a third of the screentime.

What Euphoria could really benefit from is a single woman in the writer’s room. And looking back, it’s possible that the show’s first season only worked because Levinson absorbed a woman’s artistic perspective through osmosis. Artist Petra Collins—known for her trademark photography of adolescent femininity—has claimed that she was recruited by Levinson to develop the project alongside him. She reportedly did so for months, helping to develop the series’ distinct visual style, only to be abruptly pushed out before filming began.

“I moved to L.A. and worked for HBO for about five months,” she told a Hungarian publication called Punkt, according to the Daily Beast. “I was like, ‘I am directing the show.’ I created a whole world for it, did the casting, whatever. [And at] the last minute, HBO was like, ‘We are not hiring you because you are too young.’”

“A year later, I walked out of my apartment and saw this billboard [for Euphoria], and it’s exactly what I am, as a copy of my work,” she continued. “I started crying. I was so shocked. I mean, it happens to me so many times in my career but not on a scale like that.” Critics have argued that as Collins’ influence faded and Levinson gained more control, the series became more lurid and mean-spirited.

Indeed, some of Euphoria’s recent scenes appear scripted to humiliate their performers: like the moment in Episode 1 where Faye, the air-headed drug mule played by Chloe Cherry, graphically defecates down her leg after swallowing a dozen golf-ball-sized baggies of cocaine wrapped in plastic. (The swallowing scene, too, played like a fetish snuff film.) When Faye shits on the floor, a dog scurries over and laps it up. Far gone are the days of Euphoria’s second season, when Zendaya won a Primetime Emmy for her raw portrayal of drug addiction—including that climactic, mostly-improvised scene with her on-screen mother, where Rue tears through the house on a rampage—and didn’t even need to soil herself do it.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising that Levinson personally recruited Cherry to be Euphoria’s comedic relief, after the then-adult actress starred in a pornographic parody of the show. Now, that’s basically what the show is.

It feels like Euphoria has grown into little more than an obligation all its actors are contractually trapped inside. Since the second season aired, half the cast has exploded into movie stardom, and many of them seem barely emotionally present anymore. Jacob Elordi’s Nate—once the show’s terrifying emotional center—now spends most of the season isolated in a house, appearing so infrequently that it feels like Levinson managed to book him for roughly one afternoon. (Elordi might be getting punished for taking too much time away for Frankenstein, since the last three episodes have featured his character getting his toes hacked off by debt-collecting mobsters, then sewn back on at the hospital.) Two cast members have tragically died since Euphoria first premiered, including Angus Cloud from an overdose in 2023. His death occurred before filming began, after which Levinson made the bizarre and possibly offensive choice to write Fez as still being alive, only offscreen “in prison,” while other characters continue having one-sided phone conversations with him. The whole season carries the energy of a project that should have ended years ago, but kept trudging forward anyway because HBO still had checks to cash.

If Levinson has run out of ideas, it might be because Euphoria is based on an Israeli mini-series that only lasted ten episodes. In that version, it’s eventually revealed that Rue has been dead the entire time, and her narration is effectively posthumous. The American adaptation probably won’t follow that ending, considering the original wrapped up right after high school, instead of sending everyone into careers in online pornography.

Still, after watching this season unfold, I’m tempted to pretend the Israeli version’s ending applies here too. Maybe Rue actually did die years ago. Maybe everything after season two has just been one long, pre-death hallucination manufactured by a brain poisoned with opioids and whatever Reddit forum Sam Levinson apparently discovered during quarantine.

Last Sunday, after watching Euphoria’s most recent episode, I initially found myself wondering: What woman hurt Sam Levinson badly enough to make him write female characters like this? Then I realized that by asking the question, I was instinctively searching for a woman to blame for a man’s own behavior—which is also the central ethos of this entire season. Euphoria once understood that its characters’ pain came from systems larger than themselves: addiction, loneliness, masculinity, shame, capitalism, violence. Now, every female character exists either to exploit herself, betray someone, get brutalized, or inspire male suffering. Future writers should probably take note: sometimes, the most dignified thing a story can do is end.