Euphoria is lurid, overheated, violent, fetishistic, hyper-stylized, cynical, sentimental, melodramatic, druggy dirtbag action trash, so of course I love it. But it’s not hard to see why this has come to be the position of an increasingly beleaguered minority. Even putting aside the show’s lengthy-for-a-million-reasons absence from screens and writer-director-creator Sam Levinson’s “where there’s smoke, there’s…well, there’s smoke” air of disreputability, one need look no further than Stranger Things to see how critical fortunes can shift when the stars of a high-school drama age up. That show still at least pretended to be set during high school. What is Euphoria now?
It was a high school drama for its first two seasons. (Two and a half: Don’t forget those two specials set between Seasons 1 and 2 that HBO Max inexplicably files separately from the rest of the show!) Or rather, it was a high school drama in part. As a whole, particularly during Season 2, it included a splash of Breaking Bad or the Alfred Molina scene from Boogie Nights with every scene of its teenage wasteland, which itself was equal parts My So-Called Life and Kids. Along the way it helped make stars of Zendaya, Sydney Sweeney, Jacob Elordi, and Hunter Schafer, among others; their faces gave the show’s tales of drug addiction and adolescent romantic abjection an extremely telegenic edge.
But a lot has changed in over four years since Euphoria last aired an episode, most importantly the death of actor Angus Cloud, whose good-hearted, soulful-eyed drug dealer Fezco was the bridge between the show’s slice-of-life and crime-thriller sides. Former stars Barbie Ferreira and Storm Reid have departed the show. Levinson’s interim project The Idol, which was actually very good, unjustly became a punchline.
Meanwhile, enough time has passed since we last saw our heroes that trying to pass them off as high schoolers would be even more preposterous than Stranger Things’ attempt. Euphoria’s response is reasonable, and already baked into the material: At least for this premiere, which catches us up on the lives of several of the show’s friend(ish) group of young adults, it goes (almost) all crime, (almost) all the time.
Zendaya stars as Rue Bennett, a young addict who appears to be in recovery, as long as you don’t count weed. But that doesn’t mean she’s escaped the drug world. She’s working as an indentured servant for Laurie (Martha Kelly), the flat-affect former schoolteacher turned drug lord who lost a ton of product during season 2 because of Rue’s mom, who flushed it down the toilet.
Rue’s paying off her ballooning debt to the vicious queenpin by working as a drug mule, swallowing balloons full of fentanyl in Mexico, driving across the border, and shitting them out again in the U.S. of A. She has help from her and Fezco’s friend Faye (Chloe Cherry); during the border run we watch, she has a little more trouble holding it in than Rue does. It’s as gross as it sounds — grosser, even, insofar as we watch a dog lick diarrhea off Faye’s ass.
Along the way Rue comes across a family of hardcore Christians who happily live off the land, making her wonder if she’s had it all wrong about God this whole time. The whole sequence, which hinges on Rue’s car getting stuck perfectly balanced on the top of a border fence, is half the blue southwestern skies and orange deserts of Better Call Saul, half the junkie scatology of Trainspotting.
Rue’s fortunes pick up when she’s dispatched to the remote mansion of a man called Alamo (universal television favorite Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje). A big man with a big Southern accent who wears a big cowboy hat and wields a big golden gun, Alamo is impressed by the moxie of this delivery girl, who waltzes through the house and rizzes up his legion of bikini-clad hotties like she owns the place. He personally calls off his guards, the smiling, hulking G (Marshawn “Beast Mode” Lynch) and the quiet, padawan-haired Bishop (Darrell Britt-Gibson), and entertains her pitch to come work for him instead of Laurie.
But when the drugs she delivers turn up tainted with fentanyl, Alamo is forced to wonder if she was in on it, and if she was, why the hell she stuck around long enough for them to find out. Rue, who looks like a character from another movie compared to these dudes, stammers her way through an explanation about how the Christian family she met made her think that her encounter with Alamo tonight was God’s hand at work, guiding her to a better life.
Alamo’s position is that there’s only one way to find out. Placing a green apple on Rue’s head, he does the old William Tell/William S. Burroughs trick and shoots it clean off her head. His steady aim is, presumably, proof that she’s right, and God did bring them together that night. She’s grateful to what her sponsor Ali (Colman Domingo) would refer to as her higher power for not getting her head blown off, that’s for sure!
The bulk of the fireworks go off in Rue’s storyline — no one else gets shot at with a golden gun — but we do catch up with several other members of the old gang. Rue’s best friend Lexi (Maude Apatow) lives a happy life in a nice place she pays for with her job as an assistant to Hollywood macher Patti Lane (Sharon freaking Stone). She’s falling for Dylan Reid (Homer Gere), the heartthrob on the nighttime soap Patti produces. Her old friend Maddy (Alexa Demie) works as his manager, a glamorous-seeming job that mostly entails desk work and racking up bills she can’t pay while her boss at the agency pockets the lion’s share. Neither know that Rue’s working for a gangster.
Lexi’s sister Cassie (Sweeney) has, god help her and god help us all, wound up with Nate (Elordi), her near-psychotic secret boyfriend from the high school years. Having taken over his father’s construction business after getting him busted for sex crimes, he’s trying to expand into the booming rest-home business. He hopes that “SunSettlers” franchises for dying boomers will open up nationwide…as long as he can get the first one off the ground.
Maybe that’s why he refuses to spend fifty thousand dollars on flowers for his and Cassie’s upcoming wedding. Maybe it’s simply the conviction that that’s an insane amount of money to spend on flowers. Regardless, Cassie is determined to have the wedding of her dreams and parlay her stalling career as a fetishistic Instagram influencer into cold hard cash. That means opening an OnlyFans; one glimpse at her tits is pretty much all it takes to convince the otherwise skeptical Nate that she’s got what it takes.
Removed from the inherent tragedy of seeing kids who aren’t yet old enough to vote as profoundly fucked up as the Euphoria gang were during the first two seasons, this season premiere is a Vince Gilliganesque black comedy. As such, not every joke lands: There’s a drearily out-of-date caricature of a “diverse” television writers’ room, a joke Larry David did, what, ten years ago? Twelve? Then again, the episode is set before the 2024 election, back when networks still pretended to care about that sort of thing, and perhaps that’s the joke.
Either way, it’s in keeping with the show’s overall ethos of laughing at the expense of everyone in it. Rue is as big of a screw-up and clown in this as Jesse Pinkman. Faye is like a pornified version of Janice from the Muppets, crushing on her scumbag drug-dealer boss and stuffing fentanyl balls down her throat with a splash zone that would put a Gallagher concert to shame.
Lexi is is low-key hypocrite with a crush on guy who doesn’t even know her name. Nate remains a sweaty stick of TNT in human form. Cassie is an even more over-the-top parody of femininity than she was before, now with some apparent fourth-wall breaking commentary on actor Sydney Sweeney’s own sideline as an online lingerie mogul appealing to the tradwife demographic.
Even the heavies, druglord Laurie and strip-club impresario Alamo (aka “the King of Pussy”), are ridiculous. The closest thing to a serious character is Ali, but as he half-asses his way through an explanation of biblical prohibitions against homosexuality, even he has to concede his wise-man schtick is at least partially just schtick. Everybody takes it on the chin in this one.
(The exception, of course, is Fezco, whom we learn is serving a 30-year sentence in prison over the shootout that ended Season 2. It’s touching that having lost Angus Cloud, Levinson and company couldn’t bring themselves to lose Fezco too.)
Entertaining as all this is — the hour flies by — I do miss the feeling of the first two seasons, which seemed nearly incandescent with emotional intensity. A lot of that came down to the work of composer Labrinth, who in yet more off-camera drama quit the show and pulled all his music from it after unspecified mistreatment. Hans Zimmer steps in with a spaghetti-western score that connects Rue to Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman’s Kill Bill via their shared influences. That’s a smart enough substitute, but it’s a major departure in tone that has a profound effect on the viewing experience, and it’s just one aspect of many that’s changed. Euphoria is back, and it’s good. Is it Euphoria?
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.
