If it feels like it’s been a long time since Euphoria debuted on HBO, it is: Zendaya and company first graced our screens in 2019, with a second season bowing in 2022, and the third season premiering four years later. But creator Sam Levinson has done something smart: Acknowledging that the show’s characters are all seven years older, and not high school idiots anymore.
EUPHORIA SEASON 3: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: “A lot of people have asked what I’ve been up to since high school,” says the voice of Rue Bennett (Zendaya). “And, honestly, nothing good.”
The Gist: Rue is in “Somewhere In Chihuahua”, her old Jeep being pushed out of a hole in the desert. She gets to a border wall, where she pays someone to erect a steep and narrow ramp over it. She manages to get the Jeep to the top of it, but can’t get it over to the down ramp. So she proceeds on foot, staying with a large religious family in El Paso.
Yes, this is what it seems: Rue is a drug mule, paying back the money she owes Laurie (Martha Kelly) after the dealer gave her a suitcase full of goods during high school four years prior, which Rue promptly lost. Due to interest and other calculations, Rue is in the hole for $100k. So, she has to go to Mexico, swallow condoms full of fentanyl and sweat it out as she drives back across the border.
Through all this, though, Rue has been sober, meeting with her friend/sponsor Ali Muhammed (Colman Domingo); she was very affected by her stay with the religious family, and thinks that she might be ready to welcome faith into her life. What Ali tells her is that, no matter how she might interpret what the Bible says, “you either have faith or you don’t.”
Rue occasionally crashes with her childhood friend Lexi Howard (Maude Apatow), who works at a movie studio as an assistant to Patty Lance (Sharon Stone), who produces a nighttime soap. She hasn’t communicated with their friend Fez (the late Angus Cloud) in awhile; he’s in prison on a 30-year stretch. Lexi also tells Rue that she found out from their friend Maddy Perez (Alexa Demie) that Rue’s ex Jules (Hunter Schafer) is now a “sugar baby.”
In the meantime, Lexi’s older sister Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) is engaged to Nate Jacobs (Jacob Elordi), who has taken over the property development business his father Cal (the late Eric Dane) owned. It’s been a struggle, and he’s betting on a huge assisted living facility project to bring in the cash. In the meantime, Cassie wants to bring in money so she can have the wedding she envisioned; first she does “sexy doggie” videos on TikTok, but decided OnlyFans might bring more money in, and faster.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? At this point, Sam Levinson has shaped Euphoria into something more akin to a Breaking Bad for twentysomethings, and that’s not a bad thing, as we’ll explain below.
Our Take: When you take four years between seasons — caused by the writers’ and actors’ strikes, Cloud’s death and the now-full schedules of Zendaya, Elordi, Sweeney and Apatow — you can think a lot about where you want the show’s characters to go. And we do think that in this final season of Euphoria, Levinson has really given a lot of thought into where he wants these characters to go. We can especially see this in Rue’s evolution.
Rue has always been cynical, but she’s now looking for a shred of hope in her life, in whatever form that takes. When she ends up at the mansion of a man who calls himself the “King of Pussy” (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), delivering a “package” of coke that ends up being cut with fentanyl, she feels that God led her there. She wants to be out from under Laure’s thumb and be more in charge, and given how rough she’s had it, landing in a brothel with a man as crazy as the King is indeed an act of providence.
Levinson is not pretending that his characters are in high school or even college anymore; they’re in their mid-late 20s and need to figure things out. While there were consequences to their exploits back then, many of them had their clueless parents to fall back on. Now, they’re on their own, and it’s not that easy to brush off a bad outcome, and the stakes are a lot higher.
It definitely makes the show more compelling to watch to folks like us, parents who had to contemplate what their own kids are doing or might do when they’re the age the characters were in Season 1. But it also brings a depth to what Rue and the others are doing, because they’re trying to figure things out at what seems to be a pivotal point in all of their lives.
Performance Worth Watching: Zendaya continues to convey Rue’s doubts, fears and cynicism in small ways.
Sex And Skin: There’s some brief nudity, but a surprising lack of sex in this first episode.
Parting Shot: Let’s just say that Rue feels on top of the world after the King tests her faith in a very dangerous way.
Sleeper Star: Sydney Sweeney’s Cassie is out to prove that she’s not just arm candy, and it feels like she’s going to become a pretty successful presence on OF, and maybe even bring in more money than Nate does. That should be an interesting power shift.
Most Pilot-y Line: Lexi tells Rue that “pretty soon Uber drivers are going to be extinct. It’s all gonna be automated, like AI.”
Our Call: STREAM IT. The fact that Euphoria has acknowledged the passage of time in its world is a good thing, because it now sees its characters really trying to figure out what the rest of their lives are going to look like, which is a level of depth they haven’t had before.
How To Watch Euphoria
If you’re new to HBO Max, you can sign up for as low as $10.99/month with ads, but an ad-free subscription will cost $18.49/month.
If you want to stream even more and save a few bucks a month while you’re at it, we recommend subscribing to one of the discounted Disney+ Bundles with Hulu and HBO Max. With ads, the bundle costs $19.99/month and without ads, $32.99/month.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.