Online Reporter
LOS ANGELES. — Rue is swallowing balls of drugs and smuggling them between America and Mexico.
Cassie is making erotic content on OnlyFans to pay for wedding flowers.
Nate is losing fingers and toes in blood-soaked revenge scenes and Jules is giving up her artistic career to search for a sugar daddy.
If Euphoria once felt like an exaggerated but emotionally resonant portrait of Gen Z adolescence, its latest season has pushed that chaos to near-surreal extremes.And after seven weeks polarising both critics and social media, the series concludes today.
Some viewers speculate this will be a relief to its central cast, who they say have “outgrown” the show.
In fact, many fans, teens when the show launched in 2019, say they too are ready to move on.
Zendaya, Sydney Sweeney and Jacob Elordi, all now major names, star as a group of young people navigating sex, drug addiction, friendship, love and trauma. Season three picks up half a decade after the characters left high school, following them into a far darker and more fractured version of adulthood.
When Euphoria first launched, it quickly became one of the defining shows of its generation, but after a five-year break marked by strikes, rewrites and cast departures, it returned to a noticeably more divided response.
In December, ahead of the season three launch, showrunner Sam Levinson said “this is our best season yet”. The response from critics may not have borne that out (it has a weighted average of 56% on review aggregation site Metacritic), but so far, viewing figures are the show’s highest ever.
The first episode drew a US audience of more than 12.3 million, while global viewership surpassed 20 million — a 68percent increase on the season two premiere over the same period, according to Warner Bros. Discovery.
Euphoria has always thrived on viral moments, but some viewers believe certain scenes in season three have been concocted specifically with memes and social media in mind — at the expense of character and plot.
Weeks after the relevant episodes aired, my own feeds are still flooded with edits and jokes about Cassie dressing up as a baby, and Nate telling her “you’ve been a bad, bad dog”.
‘Rage bait’
Journalist and author Jess Bacon says the show “is almost rage bait at this point”, arguing its apparent eagerness for viral moments has led to “a one-dimensional plot” unworthy of its heavy subject matter and star cast.
This season, she adds, “feels almost unrecognisable” compared with the “relatable or thought-provoking teenage experiences” seen in Euphoria’s earlier episodes. Fan Eve Rigby, 23, agrees: “I remember Euphoria resonating strongly within my friend group as the characters felt like a more stylised version of us as 17-year-olds, but season three is harder to resonate.”
Eve says the show’s visual identity — “neon LED strip lighting, gemstone eye looks and not-so-family-friendly outfits worn to your small town’s community events” — mirrored the aesthetics young people were embracing and, beneath the glitter-heavy visuals, it also reflected issues many young women recognised from their own lives.
“Cassie’s objectification, Maddy’s domestic abuse, Kat’s body consciousness, Jules’s relationship with older men, and Rue’s addiction reflected things girls had experienced or seen within our circles.”
By comparison, Eve says the latest season feels noticeably more detached from reality.
“Surprisingly, most of us aren’t OnlyFans creators or getting kidnapped by the mob. Even Lexi’s ‘normal’ life— a Warner Bros 9–5 while living alone in an LA apartment—would be a great gig for friends who tell me they’re watching season three via TikTok clips rather than paying for another subscription.”
Some fans have found the latest storylines more intense and Bacon says the show’s brutality makes it “almost unwatchable” at times.
She adds that while it continues to tackle hard-hitting themes such as sex work, misogyny and tradwife culture, it no longer approaches them with the same emotional depth and “now lacks the nuance the show has been known for”.
Writing in Vogue, journalist Daisy Jones criticised what she described as the series’ “peculiar and persistent obsession with sex work”, arguing the subject is explored in a way that now feels “dated and two-dimensional”. —BBC
Mathew Masinge