'Euphoria' Season 3 Review: Zendaya Soars in Uneven HBO Return
Zendaya in Season 3 of HBO's 'Euphoria'
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There aren’t many shows on which the gap between audacious moments that move or amaze me and complacent moments that perplex or irritate me is as great as it is on Sam Levinson‘s HBO drama, Euphoria.
Perhaps my biggest stumbling block with the show can be summed up via this simple question, which I’ve spent two seasons, plus two bonus episodes, pondering without a consistent determination: Is Euphoria actually a provocative show, or is it simply an exploitative show that looked provocative because it was focusing on characters who were too young to vote?
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Euphoria
The Bottom Line
Great moments and tawdry moments still competing.
Airdate: 9 p.m. ET Sunday, April 12 (HBO)
Cast: Zendaya, Hunter Schafer, Eric Dane, Jacob Elordi, Sydney Sweeney, Alexa Demie, Maude Apatow, Martha Kelly, Chloe Cherry, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje and Toby Wallace
Creator: Sam Levinson
At least a partial answer comes in the third season that, for all manner of reasons, arrives more than four years after the conclusion of the second. I’ve always leaned in the direction of “exploitative,” despite bracing injections of “provocative,” and the new season would seem to confirm it, as the characters leap into young adulthood and the series leaps closer to flashy irrelevance.
It isn’t that these new episodes lack for standout features, with the performance from Zendaya foremost among them. Television’s Mount Rushmore of antiheroes and antiheroines is crowded, and if Zendaya’s Rue isn’t carved into the primary peak, she’s somewhere immediately adjacent.
But the series as a whole? Attention-demanding things that played as extreme and terrifying when they were happening to teenagers simply become “things” when the protagonists are in their 20s; heightened ideas that played as gloriously melodramatic and precariously edgy expressed through high-schoolers barely count as “ideas” when run through a 20-something prism.
The three episodes sent to critics peak very early. Like “the first scene of the first episode” early, with Rue making her way across the Mexican desert on a drug run rocking out to Christopher Cross’ “Ride Like the Wind,” presumably because it contains the lyric “I’ve got such a long way to go/ To make it to the border of Mexico,” though when Rue makes it to the border she encounters Trump’s border wall. That instigates a protracted silent comedy set piece that straddles Levinson’s sweet spot between absurdist humor and nail-chewing tension.
We find out quickly that Rue has landed in indentured servitude to Martha Kelly’s deadpan kingpin Laurie, bringing shipments into the country in the most unpleasant ways possible, accompanied by Faye (the astonishingly good Chloe Cherry, now a cast regular).
It’s far from the worst life that Rue has lived, but it isn’t great. Hope comes in the unlikely form of swaggering strip club magnate Alamo (a flawlessly menacing Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), whose body-commodifying version of capitalism seems preferable to the life Laurie offers, at least until it doesn’t.
The new episodes, all written and directed by Levinson, spend a lot of time updating us on the post-high-school lives of our favorite characters.
Nate (Jacob Elordi) has taken over his father’s (the late Eric Dane, whose appearance in the third episode is potent) real estate business, leaving Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) at loose ends in their tacky mansion. Loose ends for Cassie usually lead to self-exploitation, as she starts off building a mainstream sexualized social media profile but begins to look toward OnlyFans, which seems to offer greener pastures, at least until it doesn’t.
I’m not going to spoil the lives that Lexi (Maude Apatow), Maddy (Alexa Demie) and Jules (Hunter Schafer) are navigating, except to say that on Euphoria, all storylines are not created equal and that’s perhaps even truer of this new season.
For much of the time, only Rue’s story has any clear momentum, with Lexi stuck as a total afterthought and Maddy only slightly more relevant. Cassie’s arc, a mixture of wedding planning and predictable directorial leering, feels like a rather cruel commentary on the way Sweeney has been fetishi