'Euphoria' Is In Freefall

Euphoria’s third season has me wondering if calling Sam Levinson a hack was actually too kind. A hack implies incompetence, but not necessarily a lack of effort. Levinson has proven that beyond having little in the way of coherent narrative instincts or a sufficient lack of misogyny to handle femme characters, he’s also too lazy to properly manage parallel story-lines. All season, each character’s plotline has been more or less sealed off from one another with only occasional overlap. In the most recent episode, (“Rain or Shine”), Levinson appears to hope that the death of a main character will distract from how messily he smushes the disparate threads together.

In a sense, this season of Euphoria contains three and a half different shows. One show stars Rue (Zendaya) in a Breaking Bad milieu, going from drug-dealer to stripper wrangler to arms dealer, all while paying unconvincing lip service to a religious turn the writing has in no way earned. Another show focuses on Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) and Nate (Jacob Elordi) as a tired and uninspired riff on the modern American dream of debt and grift propping up an ostensibly wealthy lifestyle. The third show is a Hollywood satire in which Lexi (Maude Apatow) and Maddy (Alexa Demie) suffer the slings and arrows of a jaded entertainment industry as they put a soap opera together. A sad half-show belongs to Jules (Hunter Schafer) that’s basically a sticky-note with “sugar baby misses art???” scrawled on it.

As Roxana Hadadi pointed out on Vulture, the story-lines feel more like hot topic issues Levinson wants to discuss than they do compelling narrative. Levinson also has nothing particularly deep to say about them. Yes, the fentanyl epidemic is horrifying, sex work is a new animal in the age of OnlyFans, the Hollywood system is a venal wasteland, and capitalism makes dancing monkeys of us all; what about it? It’s not enough to plunk those ideas down, there must be an angle or something to say. This underwritten quality seeps into every aspect of the show, especially the characters. When the narratives boil down to pointing at newspaper headlines, the characters become stilted avatars with no interior, motivation, or recognizable humanity.

“Rain or Shine” exemplifies these failings in which Levinson tries to join these underbaked story-lines together and hopes that killing off Nate will distract from the abject emptiness. All season, Nate has been hustling to build an old folks home and it’s apparent he’s resorted to some kind of scammy or illegal means, but Euphoria is unclear about it. How did he meet the predatory Naz (Jack Topalian)? What kind of deal did they strike and why did Nate agree to it? What does Nate even want out of this? We don’t know and Euphoria doesn’t bother to tell us. Without these key details, Nate isn’t a character, but a game piece being artlessly moved around the board. Nate’s death is clearly meant to be dramatic and impactful; why else bury the character alive in the plot where he hoped to build? Neither the character nor the narrative that led him there have been developed enough to give it any actual heft. It ends up playing as an excuse for Maddy and Cassie to work together in a mad mission to save him.

In fact, Maddy and Lexi are reduced to clumsy plot devices meant to weld the different threads together. It’s through a particularly clunky game of Telephone that Rue tells Lexi who tells Maddy who tells Alamo (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) that Rue is a DEA informant. If that were built organically out of the characters and their relationships, it could have felt satisfying. Instead it feels like naked plot mechanisms activating because we’re almost at the finale and it’s time for things to blow up.

Euphoria feels more like a slapdash heap of partial ideas than ever before. It’s a bad sign for the show that killing off one of the stars barely makes waves. Like The Idol before it, Euphoria’s third season is full of so many empty provocations that all I can do is shrug at it.