'Euphoria' Season 3 Review: Sam Levinson's HBO Drama Has Run Out of New Things To Say

After more than four years, Euphoria is finally back for its third — and presumably last — season. Love it or hate it, you can’t deny its cultural impact, dominating discourse on social media with its countless controversies and numerous memes, as well as catapulting many of its young cast to stardom. Unfortunately, at this point, it feels like most of them — and perhaps even society as a whole — has outgrown the need for this series. Most of the characters haven’t learned anything, and neither has Euphoria, still retaining the same strengths and weaknesses as its first two installments. I’d like to think it’s a conscious, immersive choice, trapping its audience in a toxic, unbreakable cycle along with its characters. It seems more likely, though, that Sam Levinson just doesn’t know how to make TV any other way.

What Is 'Euphoria' Season 3 About?

Euphoria Season 3 picks up five years after the events of Season 2. Rue (Zendaya) is working as an Uber driver and drug mule to pay off her debt to Laurie (the iconically deadpan, consistently great Martha Kelly), making frequent trips across the Mexican border. A dangerous drop-off at the house of a rich strip club owner named Alamo (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), becomes a lucky break for Rue, as she convinces him to hire her instead.

In Season 3, many of the characters find themselves in the business of sex in some way. Now a bored housewife, Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) enlists her housekeeper to help her film suggestive content for TikTok and OnlyFans, the earnings of which she wants to use to pay for her dream wedding to Nate (Jacob Elordi), who’s struggling to run his father’s company. Though she attended art school for a stint, Jules (Hunter Schafer) has recently become a full-time sugar baby. Meanwhile, Lexi (a very underutilized Maude Apatow) and Maddy (Alexa Demie) have both landed in Hollywood. The former is going the more traditional route as an assistant for the showrunner of a soap called LA Nights, while the latter works as a talent manager, using her keen eye to scope out up-and-coming influencers and perfectly tailoring their brands to make them millions.

'Euphoria' Season 3 Features Gorgeous Visuals and Impeccable Performances

Euphoria Season 3 certainly has its admirable qualities. Its cinematography is as beautiful as ever, featuring stunning sunrises and dazzling, neon-drenched nightscapes alike. François Audouy’s production design and Natasha Newman-Thomas’ costumes are both visual feasts, giving insight into each of the characters while maintaining the impeccable, cinematic style the show has become known for. Levinson also deserves credit for his technical directing skills, pulling off intricate sequences from the opening moments, which see Rue’s car balancing precariously on top of a fence. There’s no doubt he knows how to immerse an audience in a scene with compelling camerawork and massive setpieces with many moving parts.

The acting is also top-notch. Zendaya instantly reminds you why she’s won two Emmys for this role, playing Rue with a combination of casual recklessness and raw vulnerability. There’s a scene at the end of the first episode where you can viscerally feel the adrenaline flowing through her veins as she barks out manic, tear-filled laughter that singlehandedly displays why she’s one of our greatest young actors. She commits 100% to every scene, no matter how outlandish or brutal, and the show simply wouldn’t work if she didn’t. There’s a heartwrenching desperation in the fact that Rue is craving a connection and purpose, and though her turning to religion isn’t entirely paying off yet in the first three episodes provided for review, that plotline — as well as seeing her untraditional entrepreneurial ambitions — both have the potential to keep getting more compelling as the season progresses.

Controversial as she is nowadays, Sweeney is admittedly great as well, making a meal of Cassie’s vapid and insecure nature. While her shallowness and selfishness do toe the line of cartoonish at times, there’s something interesting in how she learns to gain and wield power over Nate, and her strongest moments are found in her subtle beats of calculated manipulation. Season 3 sees her and Nate deliciously miserable in a way that’s surprisingly grounded for this show. Who doesn’t know two high school sweethearts, stuck in their hometown and barely liking each other, who got married simply because it seemed like the natural thing to do?

Season 3, however, arguably belongs to Maddy. It’s a refreshing treat to see her thriving, using her sharp wit and relentless drive to blaze her own path. Her conflicts are authentic, giving depth to the character without reducing her to her struggles. That she’s the daughter of immigrants without a college education gives more weight and insight into why she chooses her need for security over her desire to take risks at times. The quiet confidence and magnetic quality Demie brings to her role is a bright spot of the season, and I hope Euphoria isn’t the last we see of her.

It’s Hard Not To Become Numb to 'Euphoria's Constant Shock Value

Sadly, not every Season 3 subplot is as strong as Rue, Cassie, and Maddy’s. Schafer, in particular, deserves better, as her sugar baby storyline is flat and overdone, relying on bland clichés we’ve seen a thousand times before. While Schafer does the best she can with the material, there’s not much to work with. The same can be said for Elordi, who’s more than proven his acting chops through work in projects like his Oscar-nominated performance in Frankenstein. While the end of Episode 3 hints at more juicy things to come for Nate, Elordi's character is strangely watered down this season; his financial issues simply aren’t all that riveting to watch thus far, and seem to serve solely to catalyze Cassie’s journey.

Euphoria's new characters fare even worse, playing into harmful stereotypes. Rosalía makes a solid acting debut as one of the strippers that Rue forms a close bond with, but there are uncomfortable shades of the feisty Latina trope. Akinnuoye-Agbaje has an undeniable presence, infusing Alamo with a mesmerizingly enigmatic, frighteningly volatile quality that demands reverence. Still, one can’t help but be turned off by any number of narrative decisions that appear thrown in purely to elicit a cheap gasp, including white characters calling him racial slurs. Both of them fall into Euphoria’s frequent pattern of the acting being better than the writing they’re given to work with.

Nearly every scene in Euphoria Season 3 features a woman being humiliated, exploited, or degraded in some way, and watching these new episodes quickly becomes an exhausting exercise of endurance. There’s nothing wrong with making your audience squirm, but the series is so indulgent in being repulsive that these moments lose whatever impact they might have if they were deployed more deliberately. It gets to a point where the show's violence and nudity don’t feel groundbreaking and bold — they feel like the oldest, laziest trick in the book. Certain scenes involving graphic animal cruelty and disgusting bathroom humor stoop to the lowest common denominator, becoming a punishing experience to sit through with no point or purpose besides seeing how far the envelope can be pushed. There’s a fake-deep, juvenile edginess to the whole thing that earns more eyerolls than jaw-drops.

The fact that these characters were in high school for the first two seasons made all of Euphoria's risque moments that much more shocking and uncomfortable, but in a way, it also sort of felt like the whole point. The show's five-year time jump inherently strips it of its central thesis of “look at all the adult things kids have to deal with nowadays,” making it difficult to pinpoint why Season 3 exists at all. Is it beautifully shot? Yes. Does it feature excellent performances? Many. Does it have anything interesting to say? It doesn’t, really — in fact, it amounts to a whole lot of well-crafted, weakly-written nothing.

Euphoria Season 3 premieres April 12 on HBO.