RIP To ‘Euphoria,’ HBO’s Dumbest Show

Going into the third season of Euphoria, the much-delayed, much-discussed, maybe final season of the hit HBO series, a friend roped me into catching up on the show's first two seasons. I had avoided the show during its initial run and the peak of its hype machine, mainly because the internet discourse had been so exhausting, ping-ponging between rational conversations about on-set mistreatment, exploitation of young actors, and the inflated ego of the nepo baby at the helm, to brain-melting conversations like Is the graphic depiction of the sex lives of minors OK when it's 25-year-olds playing teenagers? The series practically exists to trigger the worst kinds of online discussions imaginable, which, unsurprisingly, has helped it become HBO's biggest hit since Game of Thrones. It's the thing people love to hate, with an insane cast of young actors who have since gone on to be legitimate megastars, including Zendaya, Jacob Elordi, Sydney Sweeney, Hunter Schafer, and Alexa Demie. In a very post-Instagram, post-YouTube way, it seems as though Euphoria's audience is less interested in the show's own fictional world than in the real-world lives of the cast and the flood of gossip surrounding them, too much of it to go over here. Suffice it to say, in the eight years this show has existed, the behind-the-scenes drama dwarfs the hijinks seen on screen. With all that said, the first two seasons were mostly charming as an over-stylized, melodramatic portrait of high school for Gen Z. The kids are all high, drunk, hormonal, increasingly antisocial, and deeply traumatized. When the show portrays the characters' various traumas and their coping mechanisms—Rue's (Zendaya) drug addiction, Nate's (Jacob Elordi) hypermasculinity, Cassie's (Sydney Sweeney) attention-seeking behavior—it is at its most interesting, darkly comic, visually dynamic best. Is it at times hashtag problematic? Definitely, but that's also part of the fun early on. It's when the show needs to engineer plot that it runs into trouble. The storylines are often too out-there to fully wrap your mind around, and then those plots will be neatly tied up with a suddenness that makes you scratch your head and wonder ... so that's it then, we just move on? But ultimately, what grounds the show in the first couple seasons is the high school and the connections forged there, and that stuff works for the most part.