(Mildly) Criticizing Criticism: Quite a Few TV Critics Are Having Second Thoughts About Euphoria. Here’s Why Some May Have Made Mistakes The First Time

 

Any show that involves teenagers in my lifetime always starts to falter when the characters leave high school. It's a universal truth going back to Beverly Hills 90210 and goes through every show that was on the WB or the CW going forwards with only a few exceptions.

There's a reason for that. It makes sense to follow the same group of kids when they're in high school but once they graduate there is no realistic one for them to keep hanging out. They are all going to go to different colleges and start to grow apart. The old romances you had as a youth die out and you have to focus on your future, which isn't as fun as watching New Directions belt out sounds at McKinley.

TV shows have been struggling to escape this trap even in the era of Peak TV and they still have trouble with it. So basically they've decided to have fewer seasons or move on to college based shows. It helps that in the last two decades TV has more or less been centering on teenagers in relationships to their parents', which is more interesting even if it can become repetitive. It may become tiresome to keep seeing teenage daughters as symbols for White Male Antiheroes (I was fine with them on The Americans & Mad Men; less so with Ray Donovan) but at least we don't have to keep dealing with the drama of your boyfriend cheating on you with your best friend.

Most TV critics in my lifetime have had an odd relationship with teen dramas. The ones that are more traditional or sensationalized, from the ones I've listed above all the way to Pretty Little Liars and almost everything Disney has done over the past two decades, they've essentially dismissed as 'fluff' or 'eye candy'. They're not entirely wrong on that, but much of it has to do with the problems adults have trying to understand what appeals to teens which is a gap that has always been present and certainly has only expanded in the 21^st century. The ones that have significant crossover appeal – My So-Called Life, Freaks & Geeks, Joan Of Arcadia  -  are almost invariably cancelled so that they remain forever young – and never get a chance to fail. The few that are both usually don't have the normal teenage travails front and center (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) or have a significant adult presence that is just as powerful as the teenage actors (Friday Night Lights).

 This brings me, as you'd expect, to the recent season of Euphoria.

This is a series that everyone knows I hate with a passion and I was curious to see what critics would think once it return for its third and (God willing) final season. The early reviews are in and they are decidedly mixed, particularly for a series that was so deified in its first and second season.

The reviews for the sophomore season were more diminished then the first but there was still a fair amount of (unjustified) praise. Now the third season has debuted five full years after the second and the critics are not overjoyed its back. In fact with the sole exception of positive reviews for Zendaya as Rue, they are mediocre at best. It's currently hit a record low for the series with 56 percent approval from Critics on Rotten Tomatoes. What strikes me as  somewhat amusing is why so many are appalled.

Because of the more than four years between seasons largely because the entire cast, particularly Zendaya, Sydney Sweeney and Jacob Elordi have becomes fixtures in film during this period, by necessity there was a  time jump. Now every character is 22 and out of college. This was a necessity and they all knew it was coming.

But the thing is now that every character is out of high school and officially Gen Z almost every single critic now sees them as a bunch of whiners engaging petty things around each other. Rue is now just another drug addict, Sweeney just another twenty-something who posts her nudes on social media, Elordi just another nepo baby following in his father's footsteps, Maude Apatow another young writer realizing her artistic dreams have little to do with reality, Hunter Schafer's character a model whose flailing. They are no different in personality then they were in Seasons 1 and 2 but now they're just twenty-somethings trying to adjust to adulthood. And that's boring.

Much of this makes me wonder why critics like this show in the first place if that's their reaction. To be clear, you were fine with all of this immature, driveling behavior with no real substance and utter nihilism when all of these kids were in the same high school. Now they're in their twenties and they haven't changed one bit – and now you find it dull and uninteresting?

If that doesn't tell you that the praise for Euphoria was all about the critics' view of the world  and nothing to do with what was actually happening, I don't know what is. You're fine loving all of the hedonistic, nihilistic, social media, unrealistic behavior when high school children (or to be accurate, young adults playing high school children) were doing it. They become 22 and they haven't changed, been there, done that. We're fine seeing Sydney Sweeney posing naked on social media when she was in high school, now she's aged out of it.

What confirms this in my opinion is that Sam Levenson has apparently become more experimental in the final season, shooting much of the show on 35 MM and 65 MM lenses, giving its most cinematic look to date. This is the kind of thing that most critics will celebrate in any other tendency. The reviewers who loved Levenson for similar tricks two years ago now either think its showing off or a waste. Which again makes me thing the only reason they liked 'the cinematic tendencies' was because it showed so many young people in states of undress so much of the time.

To be fair there have been some critics who never thought that much of Euphoria from the start. A recent opinion piece by Nina Starner actually says the show jumped the shark in its second episode because of Nate's actions with Maddy and a random guy and how its never followed up on. It acknowledges just how many absurd twists were throughout the second season that undercut whatever fascinating and grounded stuff there was in it. They actually use the phrase: 'Season 2 of Euphoria actually rachets up the insanity considerably" and argues the major disbelief of the school play having a budget of, I'm guessing  one million dollars "and you've got so much disbelief to suspend that it becomes borderline impossible to do so." I can do that if the series is insane from the start but Euphoria makes it clear that it wants to take all of this insanity seriously.

Indeed in regard to Season 3 Starner basically restores my faith in criticism:

When we, as a TV watching society, look back on Euphoria, we're not going to see it as grounded or realistic. We also probably won't look back on it as particularly good. Part of the problem is creator Sam Levinson, who reportedly doesn't use a writer's room and makes life on set wildly difficult.

This doesn't shock me as a recent New York Times article basically points out Levinson being some of an enfant terrible, someone who can say that he is very much proud of The Idol which is one of the worst shows in HBO's history, and who a female director who was fired from that series has made it very clear what a contemptible person he is without saying it directly.

Starner continues:

As someone who's watched Euphoria from the beginning I feel uniquely qualified to say that I think Levinson is a man who imagination for interesting or surprising storylines is so limited that he leans really hard on shock value, which is how we got here.

As someone who reviewed Levinson's body of work in a previous article and has argued that he's basically pulling storylines from his even more bizarre film Assassination Nation for Euphoria, I'd say that's a solid guess. I'm willing to bet Starner is like the rest of the world and never saw that film and if she had seen it before she'd seen Euphoria she'd have recognized Levenson for the hack he clearly is.

I am impressed, I should be clear, with Starner's candor in admitting that she clearly misjudged Euphoria overall.  Most critics, like many of us, don't want to admit we've made a mistake with something and stay pot-committed to it even when it gets worse overtime. This is as close as any critic has ever said to this point that there really was no there 'there' in Euphoria.

I'm willing to concede that there are serious ideas at the center of Euphoria: addiction to drugs, the oversexualizing of today's world particularly on social media and the nihilism facing so many of this generation. And they deserve to be discussed maturely and seriously. But as I've written and Starner seems to concur Levenson doesn't seem to have any real insight or knowledge into this and only wants to shock the audience more than discuss it. And if that's the case, there's an argument he should have tried to do so at all.

As a forty plus man I was always uncomfortable with the graphic nudity on Euphoria and I'd gotten used to a lot from HBO alone. And frankly the cynical and brutal dialogue that Levenson gave his characters and all of the behavior was at its core, not really much different from any previous HBO drama – or for that matter what I'd seen on Shameless for the past decade. The difference was that these were wealthy (mostly) white kids as opposed to working class minorities in HBO dramas or lower class white people on Shameless. (The Gallaghers also dealt with addiction and mental health issues and engaged in self-destructive behavior but its easier to feel sympathy when you consider that each sibling has to work multiple jobs in order to keep the lights on.) The teenagers in Euphoria may not have lived in the world that the Roys did but that sense of entitlement was just as present in Rue and so many other characters.

A large part of me has always believed that so much of the critical approval. for Euphoria was because it was an HBO production. Even now HBO is still the gold standard for great television and it's mostly deserved. But that doesn't mean it isn't capable of producing flops or mediocrities, particularly in the era between The Wire ending and the arrival of Game of Thrones.  They had some clunkers, whether it was John From Cincinnati or Tell Me That You Love Me and that made some mistakes: Luck was canceled after one season: the really weird comedy Hung lasted three.

And the same was just as true in the last years of the 2010s: I remember watching quite a few disasters even from former steady hands. Whether it was Alan Ball's misfire Here & Now or Jenni Conner's morbidly unfunny Camping HBO has made it share of mediocrities if not flat out disasters. (Remember Time Traveler's Wife? Exactly.)

The main reason there was so much initial interest in Euphoria was because this was the first time in its more than quarter of a century, it was taking a swing at the teen drama format. But it was always going to be a bad fit for teen dramas because all of its shows are designed primarily for an audience that shouldn't see them.  There are issues of merit in every single great drama at the start of the Golden Age but as someone who was in his late teens when he first saw shows like Oz and The Sopranos I was not prepared to deal with them. HBO never flinched from dealing with societal issues in mature ways; that's what makes such great TV. But if I were a parent I would not want my fourteen or fifteen year old to watch a show such as Deadwood or Big Love even if I was watching with them. And I'd be uncomfortable if I knew my teenage child was watching shows like Game of Thrones and is watching House of the Dragon now.  (I know many of them did but that doesn't make them the intended audience and there's a difference.) I think there was a lot of critical latitude given to Euphoria because it was an HBO series. Had it debuted on a streaming service or even one of HBO's rivals on pay cable such as Starz or Showtime the critics would have ignored it the way they have ignored so many of the frequently higher caliber shows on both these networks over the years.  Branding is a big deal in Peak TV even now.

And the idea that Euphoria had to be taken seriously because it was a cultural phenomenon that resonated with so many of today's teenagers…well, so did Dylan McKay and the Walsh twins. So did the gang at Dawson's Creek. So did the students in Glee. So did the ones in Gossip Girl. Teenagers relating to a show only makes it popular; it doesn't per se mean it’s a classic. All of these shows had young, attractive adult actors playing teenagers at a high school and teenage audiences found something in common with them. That's not revolutionary; it's how cultural phenomena take place and it alone is not enough to make it a great show.

The fact that it launched so many of these actors to cinematic superstardom isn't enough of a reason to call it a great series either. I have no doubt their exposure on Euphoria helped get them started but that's true of basically every major cable show I've watched over the years.  HBO started quite a few brilliant young actors on the road to superstardom who were not in programs that were geared towards young adults. Michael B. Jordan was brilliant in the first season of The Wire as Wallace. Amanda Seyfried absolutely dominated some of the best actors in television on Big Love and in fact became so prominent that she left the show before it ended. And no one will say that Game of Thrones was aimed for teens but quite a few brilliant young talents started there to.

If you are given great material you can break as quickly as if you're on a smash hit. That was just as true for Claire Danes and Seth Rogen as it is for Zendaya and Jacob Elordi. Hell,  Timothee Chalamet's first big break came in a one season role on Homeland. When Damien Lewis joked at the SAG Awards "We made you, Chalamet!" he wasn't entirely wrong.

So I think its fair to say Starner's final assessment of Euphoria is the correct one. Its' not very grounded, realistic or even very good and it didn't have interesting or surprising storylines and it relied heavily on shock value. Because shock value is part and parcel with so much of HBO's programming and because it did make such a cultural impact the critics made the assumption that it was a brilliant show rather than just another snapshot of its era, no more different then how 90210 did so for the 1990s or so much of the WB and CW's programs did for the 2000s. And like so many of those teen dramas before it, when the main characters got out of high school everything the critics and fans loved about had disappeared.

I should be upfront that my initial article was a much harsher and judgmental reception of these particular critics and indeed some of that may well be present here. But I've taken out some of my earlier, harsher judgments in part because I've repeated them before and also because Starner's insight into Euphoria is enough to make me believe that there were other factors involved then some of the ones I suggested in the first draft.

I think Euphoria's legacy will be that of so many teen dramas before: it was a snapshot of young people in an era, of decent but unremarkable quality, that launched many prominent young actors to superstardom in film and television. And it is just as likely that when it is gone (almost everyone save Levenson seems sure this will be the last season) it won't have the same impact as so much of the other great television of its era. Some shows just don't age well, and that can be just as true for any show that's set in a high school.