Euphoria or dysphoria? Why Euphoria season 3 doesn’t live up to its predecessors

It’s been 7 years since Euphoria first graced our screens and gave us captivating and heart-wrenching storylines such as Rue’s (Zendaya) struggle with drug addiction, Jules’ (Hunter Schafer) exploration of her gender identity and Maddy (Alexa Demie) and Nate’s (Jacob Elordi) abusive on-and-off relationship. Director, creator, and writer Sam Levinson then offered us season 2 in 2022, centred around Rue’s worsening addiction, Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) and Nate’s clandestine love affair, and Lexi’s (Maude Apatow) tell-all play. Seasons 1 and 2 never dipped below 8 stars on IMDB, whereas season 3 so far is averaging at 6.9 and doing about half as well on Rotten Tomatoes as the previous two seasons. So with such a strong base, identity, and cult following, why isn’t Euphoria season 3 doing its prior seasons justice?

The main issue I have with this season is the characterisation. In prior years, there was a huge focus on the characters’ backgrounds, as told through flashback scenes. We learnt about Rue’s addiction and how it was rooted in her father’s terminal illness, we saw Cassie’s passion for ice skating and how she had to give it up when her father left, and we got to see Jules’ experience in a psychiatric ward as a child struggling with her gender identity. However, the only flashback scenes we get this season are for newer characters, making it easy to forget the main characters’ motivations. Not only this, but many of the backstories that Levinson so painstakingly established in prior seasons appear to be gone – Rue’s poor mental health and addiction seem to be almost entirely ignored, and Cassie’s lessons about financial strain are clearly forgotten when she asks Nate to spend $50,000 on their wedding flowers.

It isn’t just the character development between seasons that I was let down by, but also within season 3 itself. Jules was pursuing her dream of making art by going to art school but then drops out to be a sugar baby to an older man who fetishises her. And Maddy had a good, if gruelling, job as a celebrity manager, which she risks and subsequently loses by managing porn stars’ social medias.

The relationships between characters also fell flat for me this season, with many of the bonds feeling forced and inauthentic. Cassie begins by perpetuating the controversial tradwife role, before extorting her husband, Nate into letting her pursue a pornographic social media career. She and Jules both exploit the opportunities given to them by Lexi and risk her job for their own means. Furthermore, Maddy’s reliance on Cassie is hard to watch knowing all that Cassie has put her through.

The next thing that lets season 3 down for me is the over-sexualisation in the plot. The entire season seems to be an endorsement of the social media platform OnlyFans, which is primarily used to buy and sell adult content. Cassie’s storyline about paying off Nate’s debts through OnlyFans reads like an advertisement for the platform, turning the show from sex-positive to pornographic. Not only this, but Sydney Sweeney supposedly wore her own lingerie brand, SYRN, in the season 3 premiere, again making the show feel like it is advocating for hyper-sexualisation.

It is not just the character development and plot that have changed this season, but also the style. There are barely any of the iconic hazy, drug-induced party scenes and their accompanied dusky lighting and moody soundtrack. In fact, Labrinth dropped out of Euphoria season 3 altogether, taking his music with him, despite having scored the majority of the previous 2 seasons. Not only did fans lose the well-known soundtrack, but also the bold, glittery makeup that became synonymous with the show, despite the original makeup artist, Donni Davy remaining part of the show. She cited this decision as owing to the fact that the characters were now adults, which I think is where the show falters as a whole.

As demonstrated by high school dramas across time (see Riverdale and Pretty Little Liars), once the cast ages up and out of school, the show inevitably goes downhill. Previously, the characters of Euphoria existed in the microcosm of high school, where every action affected their day-to-day lives as they couldn’t avoid the people they were betraying. The audience got to see how the characters all navigated the same social space in very different ways. However, this season the stakes are massively reduced as the characters can easily avoid each other, and the narrative therefore feels much less cohesive.

Overall, Sam Levinson has given us a perfectly fine season and what is perhaps the natural progression for the characters, however it falls flat for me due to a lack of depth in both the characterisation and plot, as well as the desertion of the visual aesthetics that Euphoria had become so well-known for.