Euphoria Season 3, Episodes 1-3 Review feedzy_import_tag

The first episode of Euphoria Season 3 debuts on HBO on April 12, with new episodes following weekly. This is a review of the first three episodes, which were made available by HBO.

What even happened in 2022? I don’t remember much, but I do remember the hype around HBO’s weekly drop of Euphoria. Four years later, Rue (Zendaya) and friends are back for better or for worse. And if the rest of Season 3 shapes up like these first few episodes? I’m thinking we may, unfortunately, be in for worse.

What started as a contemplative, if melodramatic, look at the messy lives of an emotionally fraught group of teens has morphed into a wannabe crime drama with stakes amped up beyond absurdity. Rue is akin to Alice in Wonderland, navigating between two power players of the underground crime scene. Meanwhile, her friends are living disparate lives with varying levels of success.

Characters feel like mere sketches of the nuanced portraits painted in earlier seasons, reduced to their most defining traits without the flesh and sinew that made them interesting in the first place. Sydney Sweeney’s Cassie is particularly impacted by this, written as vapid, petulant, and comically materialistic. The narrative is constantly winking and nudging you as if to say, “By the way, we don’t like her anymore!” It isn’t as though I have a problem with unlikeable women. In fact, I adore an unlikeable woman. The problem is that these three episodes feel more like a badly written Mafia AU rather than a season of premium television I’ve waited four years for.

The thing is, for a set of episodes with so much going on, Season 3 is, so far, kind of boring. Much of the first three episodes establish rising tensions between drug dealer Laurie (Martha Kelly) and strip-club mogul Alamo (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje). Previous conflicts were smaller in scale, sure. Rue’s struggle with addiction, Lexi’s (Maude Apatow) developing friendship with Fezco (the late Angus Cloud), Maddy (Alexa Demie) and Cassie’s fallout over Nate (Jacob Elordi). However, these characters were so interesting, so magnetic, that their interpersonal dramas felt familiar and real. Now we’re watching disputes over drug distribution and Western-style standoffs while the literal main characters of the show sit on the sidelines.

Jules (Hunter Schafer), an ex-art school student sugar baby, is more an elusive aspiration of Rue’s rather than a fully rendered person. Lexi, assistant to a high-powered entertainment exec, is a no-fun shrew actively avoiding contact with an incarcerated Fez. Maddy, assistant to a high-powered talent management exec, is an online power broker boasting social media prowess. Cassie, now living in an opulent McMansion with soon to be husband Nate, is a housewife creating content for OnlyFans. They’re all up to something even if the narrative isn’t totally interested in what that is.

These episodes are a veritable buffet of debauchery. Sex, drugs, rock-and-roll, the works. However, this visual hedonism is so in-your-face as to be almost adolescent in its obsession. Lots of tit, lots of ass, as much nipple as a person could want. Sydney Sweeney dressed like a sexy dog, sexy baseball player, and, yeah, sexy baby.

Euphoria’s stellar cast goes misused in these first three episodes, doing their best with material that only marginally cares what their characters are getting up to. Frankly, it feels like most of them have outgrown Euphoria and the story creator Sam Levinson has decided to tell. It’s Wendy leaving Peter Pan behind. Zendaya is walking into a career-high year, slated to appear in massive projects like Christipher Nolan’s The Odyssey and Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Three. Sydney Sweeney has stirred her share of controversy but she’s been very employed while doing it and will continue to be (if The Housemaid’s box office success is any indication). Hunter Schafer has become an indie darling, while Jacob Elordi is a literal Oscar nominee now. Where once Euphoria would have been the biggest thing on their resumes, it feels now like a contractual obligation to fulfill in between projects.