Sam Levinson's New Euphoria
or What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Cassie Howard?
This obviously contains spoilers for Euphoria through Season 3, Episode 3.
It’s hard to believe for several reasons that HBO’s Euphoria first premiered nearly seven years ago. It’s even harder to believe that I care enough to write about the first Act of its third season, given how skeptical I was of the show before it first came out. But I would be lying if I wasn’t bowled over by it (as an elder 22 year-old teenager) and I’d be lying if I said I haven’t been fully invested ever since. And I insist on honesty on this blog, so I won’t say any of that.
For context, I’ve religiously watched whatever HBO has put in the hour-long 9 o’clock slot, no matter what, since True Detective season 1 in 2014, so when they swapped out Game of Thrones for some show about…all this, I was not enthused. But I got sucked into it because of how gorgeously it was shot, how honest it was about its wide range of topics, and how it seemed to have genuine empathy for its assorted carousel of characters. I liked the format of starting each episode with a spotlight on different characters, I liked how it went from dramatic explosion to extended musical moments of introspection with lush colors and flashing lights, and I loved how it took itself completely seriously. Rewatching the first two seasons (including the special episodes) confirmed that, warts and all, this was something earnest and special. For better or worse, it will be looked back on as a major tentpole of culture for this century.
But now, after four years, Mr. Levinson has brought us back to (most of) our favorite characters and is eager to update us on where in the world they’ve ended up after high school…which is to say, which seedy, taboo, LA thing have they gotten into. Is it drug trafficking? OnlyFans? Prostitution? Strip club owners? Are they in debt to some shady people? Are they stuck in the most dangerous world of all? The dog-eat-dog world of…HOLLYWOOD?? Sure, why not. All of the above.
The first two seasons were really adept at exploring the new, taboo issues surrounding being a teen in our new, scary post-modern age. And it was novel because the content was only things you heard about in non-fiction or the news, some of which are so explicit and bizarre that I won’t even mention. The issue now is that in this world of seedy, modern LA, there is nothing novel. These stock plotlines we’re now being subjected to week by week have been done to death by great and middling directors alike. And that would all be okay if Levinson managed to bring his same over-the-top gonzo style mixed with the characters he set up; but so far, he’s really not.
The most egregious example of this is my girl, Cassie Howard. Originally characterized as naive and romantic, for some reason, she is now not only outright stupid, but egregiously selfish, superficial, and oblivious to everything that’s going on around her. Watching her go full bimbo-mode pitching a fit about flowers, immediately falling for Maddy’s manipulation, and, of course, eagerly doing all the wacky lewd poses in her front yard…you can’t help but feel like Levinson is making Sydney Sweeney perform some sort of humiliation ritual. I don’t like to speculate about things like that (you can never really know authorial intent), but on this particular set with this cast’s particular history, it’s not that much of a reach. It also doesn’t make sense why Levinson treats Cassie’s suffering as cartoonish folly when he treated her with such empathy in the first season and depicts her hysteria in season two as tragic. In her spotlight episode, she’s abandoned by her heroin-addicted father who, before his addiction, was super charming and magnetic. Once she…develops…and she gets a lot of new attention from men, it follows that she falls in love easily and wants to be in a relationship, regardless of whether it’s really good for her. And it then tracks that she would be pulled toward Nate and driven crazy by his avoidant, sociopathic tendencies. All of that is both fun and endearing, especially when it gives us what’s definitely the funniest scene of the show:
This is bright and quick, where every line from a character could only come from that character with some excellent face-acting all around. It also captures the mania of how high schoolers really talk (four things at once), provides a nice diversion from the heaviness the show often has, all while still giving a bit of catharsis.
Now…what do we have? The third episode of the third season is the most appalling so far. While the first two just don’t feel like the show we’re used to, but are at least still some tolerable new thing, the third episode, the big wedding episode, is excruciating. It feels like Levinson only has interest in kicking these (often contemptible, but still empathetic) characters while they’re down and in peeling back all the layers of complexity until they’re just back to the cliché version of themselves who someone who doesn’t watch the show might assume they are. Cassie is finally getting her dream wedding and she gets the obscene amount of flowers she wanted because of her supposedly now-deleted OnlyFans account. Naturally, we can’t have this go off incident free. That makes sense, as Jeremy Strong would say, dramaturgically. So Maddy is there, Rue is there, Jules is there…Nate’s dad is there, Cassie’s mom is there, even BB is there! What chaos will ensue??
Well, not much. Nothing, really. Cassie’s mom pours poison in her ear as they walk down the aisle, which is so ridiculous and on-the-nose I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Cassie gets drunk and yells at Nate for not providing for her. She’s not at all considered with his business or anyone’s general safety, but just money. Why is that what we’re going with? Is the idea that Cassie is spoiled and shallow? Isn’t that kind of a soft target after all the time we’ve spent with her? Especially after a time-jump of like three years? While I do appreciate Sweeney’s non-Botoxed expressive forehead as seen below, it’s a shame that all she’s given to do on what should be a big episode, is act like a baby. There’s no more internal conflict or layers, we’re just meant to laugh at the spectacle of dumb tradwife getting her comeuppance.
Instead we get a lot of yelling between Nate and Cassie, the de facto villains now, and virtually no conflict as a result of anyone else. Jules, Rue, and Maddy are all people who professed wanting to kill Nate Jacobs at one point, and here they are, all these years later, reunited and…nothing. He owes money to some people and they want it back and who cares. I can’t think of a plotline more thoroughly covered in a drama than a character owing some dangerous people something. If you’re going to do that, you really have to make it your own, especially if it’s going to be the big conflict for that character. Instead there’s something about owing money for land to some guy and he breaks into their house and violently lets Nate know that there are consequences! Cassie is screaming and there’s blood all over the place and it’s at this moment that the show fully jumps the shark, which I didn’t think was possible with something already this over the top.
Which leads me to ask a question I often ask when watching something disappointing: what are we doing here? Once I ask this, there’s often no recovering. When I’m watching the guy clip Nate’s pinky toe off and all the stuff with Paladin the bird and the endless intro about whatever ~c r a z y~ stuff Jules is into now I have to wonder what we’re doing anymore. Rue’s flirtation with religion in one moment and giddiness at selling guns in another is almost something, but it’s not what I’m looking for. Because it’s not Euphoria, anymore. These aren’t the same bizarre, human people I grew to know and have affection for. These are cartoon caricatures, who, frustratingly, Levinson isn’t even willing to have productively crash into each other. And sure, we’re only three episodes in and there are at least five hours of this left somehow, so maybe I’ll be wrong, but at this point…what are we doing? Who are you really mad at? Is this just a Tarantino-lite homage style exercise or do you still have the same interest in addiction, abuse, and codependence that you used to. I have to include this tweet from Ethan Vestby who nails the particular kind of obnoxious the show has turned into: the worst of American Hustle, Babylon, John F. Donovan, etc. cobbled into one.
Now, I’m a big believer in not complaining about a problem without offering a solution. And the antidote to this weightless, loud teen drama can be found in the recently ended Tell Me Lies, a show that often crosses into territory I could only describe as Shakespearean. Similarly, that is a show about a collection of beautiful college students who betray and love each other, and while it’s not as impressionistic or creative as Euphoria was at its peak, it does take itself just as seriously. This is important to me because it feels like we have been drowning in irony-poison for a very long time now, culturally, which is good for nothing. And if there’s one thing that Sam Levinson, Aaron Sorkin, William Shakespeare, and Meghan Oppenheimer (the showrunner of Tell Me Lies) all have in common is that they go for it regardless of how their work might be perceived. Which you can’t say for something like Babylon, the fourth season of Industry, or the third season of Euphoria so far which seems so desperate to try to break away and try something new, only so as to subvert expectations that it’s annoyingly self-conscious. I get that it’s been a long time and that these characters are no longer angsty teens so it’s time to move on to different subject matter. You can still do that. I’m just disappointed that Levinson seems to be much more interested in stripping his characters of their previously established nuance, and then punishing them for it.
And then when he’s not doing that, he’s focusing on the least interesting subplot of season 2, which was all the drug stuff. That’s made up for at least half of the content so far, and it’s painfully boring. I’m not even insisting that the plot has to be moving forward or that there be a plot at all; oftentimes in season 2, it would feel pretty aimless. But there was still a sense of thematic cohesion and at least a good deal of love that feels completely absent now. Is that the point? That LA flattens you out and strips you of your character? If so, it’s neither a new nor an interesting one. And it’s certainly not best articulated by dragging your characters through the most predictable broken glass.
A few final gripes and complaints:
What the hell happened with Labrinth? The music was one of the core things that set this show apart and Hans Zimmer coming in with his little riffs are not working for me.
This is the only HBO drama (out of like the 30 I’ve seen) that has never had a 90-second title sequence at the beginning. I actually kind of grew to like the 10-second long title card with just the title against black, and now we’re doing this big retro Tarantino font over an image with the stupid copyright. Yet another thing that makes it seem imitative and like anything else.
Keeping Fezco alive canonically is stupid and in poor taste. I can only imagine how they’ll eventually acknowledge Kat. He won’t be able to help himself.
Anyway, I’ll come back to it when it’s all over, but for now, I have to go. There’s a new episode in fifteen minutes.