Ever since Euphoria against
all odds and reason has become such a cultural phenomena and is so highly
worshipped by a certain faction in America I've been asking myself a question:
how did this show ever get greenlit, much less become a series? It wasn't until
fairly recently I realized that the answer to the question had been staring me
in the face all this time.
The creator of Euphoria as
its fan are possibly aware is Sam Levinson. I've been asking myself who Sam
Levinson was and why HBO was willing to greenlight a show by him based on his
track record prior to it because I've seen some of the movies he's made in the
four years since the second season of Euphoria ended – both prior to and
after the series debuted in 2019 and
they are no better then his flagship show and in many cases are far worse. It
wasn't until I saw the credits of one of his films that I realized that Sam is
a nepo baby pure and simple.
Sam is the son of Barry Levinson,
one of the most incredible forces in Hollywood for more than half a century.
0bviously I'm a fan of his for his work in the creation of Homicide but
he's been a force in film and TV for half a century.
He is the writer and director of
some of the greatest films in history, from Diner, The Natural and Good
Morning Vietnam to his Oscar winning Rain Man as well as Bugsy and
the underrated masterpiece Wag The Dog. In the 21st century
he became one of the directors of many Emmy nominated and winning TV movies for
HBO, mostly in collaboration with Al Pacino. These include You Don't Know
Jack, Phil Spector and Paterno. He also directed two episodes of the
Emmy winning miniseries Dopesick and an early Peacock limited series The
Calling. He's also produced many other undervalued TV series in connection
with Tom Fontana including Copper and most recently Monsieur Spade. Even
as we speak he is currently working on three different TV series.
Barry Levinson's films,
particularly the ones set in Baltimore, have always been known for their
humanity and understatement, an absence of flashiness to them. I love his work
for film and TV because he's interested in looking at humanity and the deeper stories.
This is not a trait that his son
Sam shares. Indeed Sam Levinson managed to write two films and direct three
others before he managed to get his job for Euphoria. Since Euphoria exploded
he's written two other films and created another TV series. I've seen a bit of
his work since then and its safe to say in none of them does he show the talent
of either his father when it comes to storytelling or humanity, nor the
subtlety and nuance that one associates with so many of the great writers in TV
and film of this past century. Looking at Levinson's work, I keep thinking
these are the products of a child who wants to be as good as his parents but
basically doesn't have that talent. Yet he continues to get jobs because he's
trading off the name of his more famous parent. This is almost certainly true
for how his relationship with HBO began and it may well be the only reason Euphoria
got greenlit. It has nothing to do with his actual talent.
This piece will by and large not
relitigate my issues with Euphoria; my readers know what they are and
I'm not going to beat that dead horse. What I will do is discuss some of
the films and TV shows I've seen him do in the last few years which it make it
crystal clear that Sam Levinson was first coasting on his father's reputation
and then on Euphoria's success. Furthermore there's an argument even
before Euphoria aired he was a one-trick pony and he didn't come up with
anything original even then.
You can't exactly blame him for
the flaws of Rogues Gallery his film debut as a screenwriter. A
ridiculous action comedy featuring Zach Galifanakis, Adam Scott, Bob Odenkirk,
Ving Rhames and Maggie Q all playing government spies with the code names of
Tarot Cards (Chariot, Hermit, Magician, etc.) It's basically Hudson Hawk with
less control but more imagination. It's completely insane but that's one of its
charms.
That's not present at all in Another
Happy Day Levenson's directorial debut and by far the closest thing he ever
did to his father's work. Set in an estate in Annapolis (not far down the road
from Baltimore) we follow Lynn (Ellen Barkin) at a wedding at her parents
estate (Ellen Burstyn and George Kennedy) as she deals with a series of very
touchy family dynamics. Lynn hopes to have a reunion with her family but her
middle son (Ezra Miller in an early role) assaults everyone while her daughter
Alice struggles with her demons. Like so many of his father's films the best
laid plans of the protagonist quickly self-destruct under the complicated and
increasingly angry family dynamics of her siblings.
The film was a box office
disaster, making $8,464 its open weekend and as a result very few studios would
touch anything Sam did again. His father
eventually came to the rescue letting him co-write the screenplay of one of his
next TV movies for HBO The Wizard Of Lies, the story of the rise and
fall of Bernie Madoff. The film received four Emmy nominations including Best
Actor in a Limited Series or TV movie for Robert DeNiro as Bernie Madoff and
Michelle Pfeiffer as his wife Ruth. Sam would receive a WGA nomination for Long
form adaptation for TV for it and along with the acclaim he got for the film he
was on HBO's radar.
Around this time his second film
was greenlit, Assassination Nation. I've seen this…film quite a few
times and it's as if Harmony Korine and Lars Von Trier made a high school film
only it was somehow more stylish. The film deals with four teenage girls in
high school, played by Odessa Young, Abra, Em, Suki Waterhouse and Hari Nef.
The movie opens with them in a motel room saying "We may not survive the
night.
Here's just one line:
Like, what's the motive behind
300 plus mass shootings every year? There is none. People just burn out, wanna
take down their own little universe.
There are so many rape jokes you
wonder how many were cut out. There are gunfights, stand-offs, endless nude
shots, lots of drugs being done and jokes about child molestation. It features
Maude Apatow and Colman Domingo in critical roles. The movie ends with a
marching band doing a number down a series of burnt own cars and houses. In
other words, it would be a fairly dull episode of Euphoria.
It's too easy to say that the
pilot for Euphoria is pretty much cut from the same cloth as Assassination
Nation. I have a feeling, based on
seeing this film, that Levenson had an entire franchise planned and when this
movie became such a critical and box office disaster he turned it into a TV
series. Because the opening two minutes of this movie basically show with a
subtitle every single thing that will happen in Euphoria during the
first season with the sole exception of Rue's drug addiction and her relationship
with her parents.
I have no idea how Sam Levenson
pitched Euphoria to HBO and they were willing to buy it. Aside from both
he and his factor's connection to the network there's nothing in the pilot much
less the first season that meets the metric of what the network was putting out
during the 2010s. It's a combination of how simultaneously open-minded and
morally depressed Hollywood was in the aftermath of the 2016 election that this
show got greenlit at all, much less so well received. I really believe nobody
who's written a favorable review of it has seen Assassination Nation, otherwise
they would realize that Levenson was essentially ripping off his own material
and doing over and over for one season and then a second.
In hindsight the story involving
Rue and Ali by far the strongest relationship in the entire series, honestly
seems like it belongs in a different show entirely. Hell Colman Domingo's
character really doesn't seem like he belongs in the same universe as
everything else that's going on in Euphoria. Domingo's performance is
far and away the best thing about Euphoria for that very reason; because
he's basically untouched by everything that's involving all the other teenagers
and their parents Domingo can manage to rise above the lunacy of five year olds
with cigarettes, social media erotic posing and penises as far as the eye can
see. Ali's conversations with Rue are among the few times you can see anything
real among all the flash and illusion.
Many of the other actors and
actress have been superb in other shows and films; there's a reason that Jacob
Elordi and Sydney Sweeney have become stars and why Maude Apatow and Hunter
Schafer are becoming presences in film and TV. But everything on Euphoria is
very much in the style of Assassination Nation; there's a lot of style
on the surface but there's nothing beneath it. Of all the dramas that have come out of HBO in
the past decade that have been nominated for or won Emmys for Best Drama Euphoria
stands apart as the only one that seems to be pure style and image with
nothing to say. Whether that will change
after the third – and what is likely to be the final season – remains to be
seen but given what Levenson has written in the interim between Seasons 2 and
3, it's not clear if he had anything else to add to the discussion.
Malcolm & Marie a film which debuted in 2021 was
essentially a black and white two person show between John David Washington and
Zendaya in the title roles. Made for Netflix, it is the story of how a director
and his girlfriend's relationship goes into overdrive during a single night.
Mostly known for Zendaya's work (she was nominated for multiple awards for Best
Actress) it's a more toned down film that one was used to from Levenson at that
point.
While the second season of Euphoria
was airing Levinson then adapted a Patricia Highsmith novel for Adrian Lyne
called Deep Water. Ben Affleck played a
husband who allowed his wife to have affairs in order to avoid divorcing
here and then became a prime suspect in the disappearance of her lovers.
This was the first project that
Levenson had written as an independent screenplay since The Wizard of Lies and
its difficult to blame the flaws of the film as much on him as the director.
Lyne was best known in the 1980s and 1990s for a series of erotic thrillers.
His best were the Oscar nominated Fatal Attraction and Unfaithful; his
most pornographic was 9 1/2 Weeks and somewhere in the middle was Indecent
Proposal. This was his first film of any kind in twenty years and by this
point he could only get it released in Hulu. Lyne had been a voice of the
Zeitgeist in the 1980s; by 2022 he had run out of things to say and its
difficult to blame the real difficulties of the film, most notably the age
difference between the two leads, on Levinson.
All the blame, however, must go
to Levinson on what was his follow-up project to Euphoria, The Idol. Initially
one of the most heralded projects of HBO during the spring of 2023 it very
quickly became arguably the biggest disaster HBO has had during the 21st
century. A collaboration between
Levinson and the artist The Weekend, it very quickly became clear that
it was HBO's Showgirls, without even so much as the camp value.
The reviews were the worst any
HBO project had ever received and the network received such horrible press that
they actually cancelled the show while it still had an episode left to air.
They did so, I should add, during June of 2023 when the WGA and SAG-AFTRA
strike were devastating the airwaves and viewers were crying out for original
programming. No one seemed to mind that they never saw how the series ended.
Levinson turned 41 this January.
He has spent much of the last two years writing and then filming the final
season of Euphoria which is scheduled to debut in less than a month. So
I think before it airs the time has come to ask certain questions about
Levinson's abilities as a writer and director.
At this point Levinson has been
nominated for two Emmys, both for the second season of Euphoria. The
first was producing, the second for co-writing music and lyrics for one of the
songs with Zendaya and Labrinth. (Labrinth, it should be noted, has announced
his retirement in a very public tweet where among other things he said:
"F---- Euphoria). He has never been nominated for writing or
directing an episode of the show, though he did win the DGA award for TV for
the 'Stand Still Like a Hummingbird' episode of the show and was nominated for
other awards for it. To date Euphoria has won 9 Emmys, two for Zendaya
and one for Colman Domingo. The overwhelming number of the nominations and wins
have been for technical elements, makeup, music, cinematography and costumes.
Multiple actors have been nominated for awards in the cast but Levinson has
basically been ignored save for the ones I tell you about.
What this tells me as Euphoria
is far more respected for its technical aspects and some of the
performances than anything Levinson has contributed to it. This is an outlier
for great dramas not just for HBO but almost any peak TV drama in the 21st
century. Even the most visual stunning series on HBO, whether they are Game
of Thrones, The Last of Us or The White Lotus, tend to get multiple
nominations for writing and directing when they are on the air. I will grant
you that Euphoria has had to compete against Succession both
years it has been eligible but consider what it was up against in the most
recent year 2022: Better Call Saul, Ozark, Squid Game, Yellowjackets,
Severance & Stranger Things. Those shows were able to get
writing and directing nominations (save Yellowjackets to this point)
every year they were on the air. Levenson,
who has written and directed every episode, stands alone from all his fellow
showrunners in that regard. That's strange for a series that in a short time
has become such a part of the cultural conversation'
I take away that while there are
fans of the technical aspects and the actors there's not as much respect in the
industry for Levenson's part in creating Euphoria. And this show as well
as Wizard of Lies are the only works of film and TV that have
received a positive critical reception from the industry at all. And considering the body of his work,
there's something very troubling about it.
Assassination Nation and Euphoria have a very
exploitative vibe with the latter honestly seemingly more like highly stylized
pornography then an actual TV show. Deep Water was a film where the
Alliance of Women Journalists nominated it for the award for 'Most Egregious
Age Difference between The Leading Man and the Love Interest' which is a
different kind of exploitation. The Idol was notorious for just how
exploitive the relationship between the characters played by Lily-Rose Deep and
The Weeknd was.
It's very difficult for me not to
look at Levinson's overall work and see a cross between the films of Larry
Clark and Gaspar Noe, two filmmaker who were controversial for graphic nudity
and unsimulated sex scenes usually with actors playing characters below the age
of consent. While I'm not entirely onboard with so many of the new standards of
morality that have emerged in Hollywood in the past decade in the case of both
of these filmmakers and quite a few others, I'm more than onboard with the idea
of intimacy coordinators and so forth.
One of the reasons I've had so much difficulty watching Euphoria for
even a few minutes is that it does seem very much like child pornography
and exploitive. There has been a fair amount of discussion about this in
Levinson's work, particularly after The Idol, but it doesn't make me any
more comfortable with those critics and audiences who still eagerly anticipate
the new season of the show.
And unlike filmmakers and TV
writers who tend to show growth as they mature almost all of Levenson's work
ever since Assassination Nation retains this kind of exploitive feel to
it. With the critical exception of the writers behind Game of Thrones, almost
every major TV writer associated with HBO during this century has tried to move
on to a different subject when they had a successful series, whether it was
David Simon or Alan Ball, all the way down to Craig Mazin. For all the bright
colors in Levenson's pallet in his film or TV, they all basically are painting
the same picture and its far more stylistic than substance.
I'm not sure if at this juncture
I'm prepared to write Sam Levinson off as a creative force: he is relatively
young and he might very well be able to regain the humanity that was
occasionally present in some of his first films. What I do know is that his
work for HBO lacks the depth in terms of writing and directing that I've come
to see from a network that still remains the gold standard for TV in my eyes.
Barry Levinson and his production company did much to help lead that revolution
and the father has done much to add to the luster of it in so much of his work
for the network. Sam, with his work seems determined to spray graffiti using a
substance that is decidedly not aerosol in the 2020s. This is one case
where I think the child needs to be more like the father than anything else.
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