‘Euphoria’ Season 3 Review: Sam Levinson’s HBO Drama Grows Old and Boring

In the very first scene of “Euphoria” Season 3, Rue is spinning her wheels. Stuck in the desert somewhere just south of the American border, Zendaya’s desperate, unreasonably chipper addict is trying to get a duffel bag filled with who knows what from Chihuahua back to California, but her off-road route is filled with impediments. First, her truck tire falls in a hole. With a little help, she gets moving again, but escaping one trap only leads to another more perilous snare.

It’s as if Rue’s entire life is made up of two modes: frustrating inertia or paralyzing anxiety. Worse yet, both states still manage to sneak up on her. How could something that started off so silly suddenly turn harrowingly lethal?

Her (re)introductory predicament — which culminates with Rue literally teetering between life and death — isn’t exactly a subtle metaphor, but “Euphoria” isn’t exactly a subtle series. Rue has been trapped in a nightmarish cycle since the moment we met her, seven years ago, as a drug-addicted 16-year-old returning home from a rehab center she’ll soon revisit, if not soon enough. Now, at 22, Rue is still stuck. Any hope for a safety net is gone (her mother kicked her out of the house to protect Rue’s younger sister), and the freedom promised in adulthood may be nothing more than a mirage.

But she wants it. She really does. Rue, after escaping unscathed one more time, is so desperate to live the life she wants rather than the one imposed upon her that she welcomes God into her heart. She may not understand faith, the Bible, or how to interpret ancient texts for modern times, but damn it, she’s going to try. Because by Season 3, something has to change, and if she can’t change her circumstances, she can at least change her approach to them. She can change. She will change. Or she’s going to die trying.

Damn, now that’s drama, amirite? While Rue’s position is fixed, season after season, her struggle to break free makes her compelling. Sure, she’s spinning her wheels, but that’s the point: As soon as you’re in a hole, it’s so very hard to get enough traction to dig yourself back out, and even if you do, it’s so very easy to fall back in. That’s the life of an addict, at least in the story “Euphoria’s” telling.

Or it’s part of the story it’s telling. Throughout the buzzy initial run, Sam Levinson‘s HBO series has been hailed for Rue’s honest reckoning with addiction, as well as Zendaya‘s potent, pliable performance of her highs and lows. Those elements remain strong in the long-delayed Season 3, but the rest of the story is maddeningly inert across the first three episodes (out of eight total). Most characters aren’t changing, nor are their motivations to change clear to them or novel to us. The result is a start to the supposedly final season that grows old instead of up, while evoking a once-unthinkable question: How could “Euphoria” become boring?

Part of the tedium should’ve been anticipated. The series didn’t earn its provocative reputation solely for what fans witnessed across the first two seasons; it’s also from where and when those proddings took place. Whether or not viewers agreed on Levinson’s vision of a modern high school — although I hope Ashtray (Javon “Wanna” Walton), with his face tats and killing sprees, is unfamiliar to most of us — they could recognize these were kids who were just trying to graduate. Taking those characters out of the classroom and thrusting them into the real world removes key context that helped make “Euphoria” so frightening: relatability.

Now, Nate (Jacob Elordi) is just a nepo baby who inherits his father’s real-estate business and — in what feels like a comment on Gen-Z American lethargy — isn’t very good at building anything. He and his fiancée, Cassie (Sydney Sweeney), sure look the part of a happy, prosperous couple — they live in a big house, eat dinners by candlelight, and host cook-outs for friends and colleagues — but a quick peek behind the curtain exposes a rotting foundation. He’s crippled with debt, she can only make spaghetti, and they’re lying to everyone they know.

Sydney Sweeney in ‘Euphoria’Courtesy of Patrick Wymore / HBO

They’re just another couple play-acting the American dream, which we’ve seen many times before. Considering how Elordi and Sweeney’s careers took off in between seasons, it’s especially disappointing to see their talents squandered on repetitive, obvious character arcs. Nate is exactly who he’s always been: a sociopathic jackass (although a more believable one so far this season). Cassie might have regressed since graduating, which could be interesting if her vacuity stirs things up as it has in the past. Not yet, though. Early on, she’s just posting naked pictures online, hoping to get famous via OnlyFans in the second prestige TV show this spring to broach the topic (and the only one to render immediate, simplistic judgement).

Each actor gets a few moments to crank up the melodrama, but what’s happening behind their red, bulging eyes is so one-dimensional it reads like they’re merely mugging for the memes. Nate and Cassie are all buttoned up without anything to hide — at least, anything scrutable enough to drive interest in whatever comes next.

Lexi (Maude Apatow) remains a supporting presence at best. Sure, her play lit some exciting fires, but Levinson’s disinterest in the group’s goody-two-shoes is evident in her Season 3 glow-up: She’s a writer’s (Sharon Stone) assistant, which puts her in Maddy’s (Alexa Demie) orbit. Nate’s ex-girlfriend is now an assistant to a talent manager whose inherent hustle lends her an intriguing edge, until she regresses in Episode 3. Jules (Hunter Schafer) doesn’t develop so much as she moves — into a deluxe apartment in the sky, all the better to symbolize the hope she embodies for Rue’s escape.

Even if the first three episodes are just table-setting — which they very well may be, given how Episode 3 ends — a good story shouldn’t take so long to get going. When “Euphoria” Season 3 isn’t playing up its Wild West theme with whip-cracking sound effects, old-timey title cards, and super-wide aspect ratios (Levinson shot on 35mm and 65mm film stock, “providing an expanded image [that] mirrors the characters’ journeys out of high school into the wider, wilder world,” per HBO), it’s wallowing in misery. Sequences aren’t edited within an inch of their life and instead get room to breathe — maybe too much room. The pace is less frenetic, which emphasizes the tedium and makes the nauseating moments (shit and piss, from animals and humans, are recurring motifs) feel even more contrived than in past seasons. (But hey, at least the desert looks pretty.)

Maybe the pain is the point: Maybe a whole generation of teens entering adulthood feels like they have nowhere to go in a country with declining career opportunities and decaying morals. Maybe we’re all just spinning our wheels, hoping something, anything, catches hold and keeps the world as we know it from collapsing further into itself. “Euphoria” always skewed nihilistic, so none of these ideas are out of place in what may be its last season. But Levinson’s series was never this spiritually hollow, and it was always more active, insistent, and ambitious.

Why not go down swinging? That’s what Rue would do, and that’s the only reason to hope “Euphoria” will find the meaning it seeks before its own time runs out.

Grade: C-

“Euphoria” Season 3 premieres Sunday, April 12 at 9 p.m. ET on HBO. New episodes will be released weekly.