Now That It's Finally Over I Ask One Last Time, What Was Euphoria's Purpose? (2900th Article)

 

I take a certain pleasure that even before the final season aired, many critics were beginning to wonder if they had been wrong about Euphoria during its first two seasons. By the time it was two episodes underway all the critics who had once raved about it were having similar doubts. And by the time it staggered to its final episode last May the entire world had turned on it. No one, as far as I know, was unhappy that Sam Levenson had announced this was the end of the road.

In showing just how far Euphoria had fallen it plummeted off the list of contenders for Best Drama and indeed most other awards by the time the show was over. After receiving 18 nominations as well as a nomination for Best Drama for Season 2 it was only nominated for six Emmys and only Zendaya was nominated for Best Actress among the major cast. Colman Domingo received a final nomination for Best Guest Actor but that is far more likely to the immense respect Domingo has earned in TV in the interim between seasons.  Any realistic chance of Zendaya managing a three-peat seems unlikely as Rhea Seehorn and Keri Russell have all the momentum behind them.

So now that Euphoria has sputtered to its conclusion I think it's well past time to ask the question that really should have been asked from day one: just what did so many people see in this show that awed them for so long? Because almost from HBO's decision to greenlight it, it seemed like it was a horribly flawed concept.

Much of the anticipatory buzz for Euphoria was the fact that for the first time in two decades HBO was doing a teen drama. That itself should have raised the Jeff Goldblum meme: everyone was so impressed that they could no one considered if they should.

Because HBO and the teen drama were not things that could never go together. Teen dramas in the 21^st century on network television were increasingly being accused of over sexualizing its teenage actors, having them talk with immense adult dialogue and deal with increasingly unrealistic situations. There'd been a lot of controversy over many of the  WB's shows and Glee and those were network dramas. For a network that was known for having 19^th century Americans use what seemed to anachronistic profanity, had showed ancient Rome with an incredible amount of gore, and who had done every kind of perverse act of sexuality imaginable in Westeros doing a show set in high school was a bad match for a reason.

And that's because Euphoria was the first teen drama ever made that no teenager should have watched.  Now I accept that teenagers watched Game of Thrones all the time it was on the air and that the V-Chip and TV ratings have been basically bandages when it comes to controlling the viewing habits of young people. But if you're going to make a show about teenagers there's an argument that it should not  have the same level of profanity, violence or depravity you got on every other HBO show.  I understand the major plus on working for HBO is that they give you the artistic freedom to do whatever you want with no rules. But there's a difference for doing it for mobsters and dope slingers and teenagers at a high school.  I'm honestly stunned that there was no real backlash from any of the critics at the time about any part of it, not the least of which there were so many sequences that stretched the charges of teenage pornography to its limits – and those were just between the student body.

This brings us to the next issue I have with Euphoria: if you take away the aspects of it being a teen drama there wasn't a single issue that hadn't been explored in nearly every other HBO drama in the first two decades of the network's entry into great drama – and had  been done much better.

Let's just start with the main reason Sam Levenson said he wanted to tell the story of drug addiction. That was a feature of every HBO drama from OZ right up to Boardwalk Empire. The seedy underbelly of drugs and the consequences of it have been at every level, most notably in everything David Simon ever did for HBO, but we also saw Christopher famous deal with an addiction to heroin throughout The Sopranos, Alma Garrett's addiction to opium in Deadwood and the issues Claire Fisher had with drugs throughout the first season of Six Feet Under.  If you want to make 'addiction' a broader term, Brenda famously had an issue with sex addiction in Season 2 of Six Feet Under and we all know that vampires have an addiction to a very specific uncontrolled substance.  And it wasn't as though we hadn't seen the effects of addiction on teenagers done so well in The Wire, both the addicts and those in the trade itself.

And that's just HBO. Showtime dealt with the world of drugs quite a bit in its comedies, in perhaps too lighthearted a vein in Weeds, a more serious one in Nurse Jackie and we saw two members of the Gallagher clan end up going to AA by the time Euphoria debuted.  And there was the cartel in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, hell FX debuted Snowfall which dealt with the crack epidemic in LA during the 1980s.

The difference between all of these shows and what Rue was going through in Euphoria was the difference between the kind of dramas HBO made when it transformed television in the 2000s and the kinds of shows it was making by the time it greenlit Euphoria. If you came of age watching these shows you know that what made HBO extraordinary was how it looked at the darkest and seediest underbelly of the America we lived in, whether it was in Oswald Maximum Security or the camp in Deadwood. It was looking at America at the darkest and more importantly working class level of it, with all its failures.

But by the 2010s HBO had essentially moved away from that kind of TV in both comedy and drama, with the sole exception of David Simon who kept to his standards with Treme and The Deuce.  During that era HBO began to move, for whatever reason, towards upwardly mobile and upper class America and their angsts and misfortune. The comedies were essentially all variations of this from Girls to Veep to Silicon Valley while the dramas took this whether we were in Westeros or Waystar Royco.  There were exceptions – Insecure, the first season of True Detective – but basically those were the kinds of TV HBO was making in the 2010s and Euphoria was greenlit during that period.

It's no secret I found much of this programming overrated but it's only recently I've figured out why. HBO was at its best during the 2000s when it look at the darker side of America and compared the struggles of the criminals and thugs in America as something necessary in the decline of the American dream. But by the middle of the 2010s it had basically turned away from those kinds of shows to looking at those struggles from the perspective of white upper-class America, the Masters of the Universe. It's one thing to argue the characters in The Sopranos or The Wire are not bad people, they're just trapping in a horrible broken system and its easier to believe because it involves the less fortunate, and those left behind. But the shows of Armando Iannucci didn't bother with that distinction, and we were being asked to be entertained by people who had all of the power and the wealth in the world – and yet somehow were still unhappy with their lot in life.

Levinson might want to argue that he was trying to paint a world of just how miserable contemporary teenagers were. But it doesn't change the fact that every single one of the high school students was in a world of privilege that everyone in every teenage character from the previous decade of HBO dramas would find them all spoiled kids who don't know how good they have it.

And it's not like there weren't a lot of well-portrayed teenagers during that first decade. Meadow and AJ Soprano were well illustrated in the first few seasons of The Sopranos; Lauren Ambrose's work as Claire Fisher was a force of nature and The Wire was full of brilliant teenage actors who broke your heart ("Where's Wallace?!") Indeed Big Love, a vastly underrated HBO drama, featured the breakout role of Amanda Seyfried as the eldest daughter of the polygamist Hendrickson clan. Clearly Bill's favorite, as the series progresses she becomes increasingly desperate to escape from the quicksand that is their increasingly toxic world. I've never forgotten her incredible breakdown during the classic 'Come, Ye Saints' episode where she suffers a miscarriage from the pregnancy she was hiding from everyone.

All of them would look at Rue in the series premiere when she's just gotten out of rehab again and forces the head of her NA meeting to sign her card and would be appalled. Bubbles would be horrified at her lack of respect. The system was so broken that the best he could hope for is being able to attend an NA meeting after being sent to jail and going to a halfway house. Rue's mother managed to get her into a rich treatment center and she can't even bother to stay sober for a week! Zendaya might be bi-racial but everyone in Baltimore would be exasperated. "All that white privilege and you ain't even using it!" I could see Kima Greggs saying if she busted her.

After Euphoria came to an end Levenson would argue that at a certain level all of the teenagers and adults were dealing with addiction in some form. But that isn't an original insight either. In one of the first episodes of OZ  Augustus Hill argued that everyone was an addict in a sense: "Some people mainline wealth! Some people snort politics." Indeed it was a theme that Fontana came back to quite a few times on OZ and it had weight because the system was so badly broken.

Levinson would also argue that much of Euphoria was based on his own personal journeys. I hate to say this but that's a truth universal to almost every addict and we've read more than our share of memoirs and biographies on it. Not every recovering addict is as fortunate as Levinson to survive and almost none get to make an HBO TV series about their journeys.

None of this would have bothered me if Levinson had any real insight or something original to say with Euphoria.  What we got, honestly, was the same kind of excess that so many viewers were getting on shows like True Blood and Game of Thrones only it was in a contemporary setting and almost entirely focused on teenagers. During the first twenty years of HBO's existence much of the greatest drama came from writers pushing the boundaries of cable TV to tell stories of great substance. Deadwood and Six Feet Under were among the masters of this.

 Euphoria, by contrast, was nothing but an exercise in style and Levenson seemed to use all of this excess to hide that he had really nothing original to say. Even before Season Three debuted many critics were beginning to question Levinson's continuous leaving plots open for an entire season and even beyond that.  Such excesses could be excuse if they were involving adult dramas but because the show was set in a high school it was clear Levinson had left reality three exits back.

It's clear much of the focus was based on so many of the brilliant young things that came out of Euphoria: not just Zendaya, but Sydney Sweeney, Jacob Elordi, Hunter Schaffer and Maude Apatow.  But none of this hid the fact that we were seeing the same level of excessive nudity and sex that we were getting in any other HBO show and it absolutely should have been questioned given that it debuted during the so-called 'reckoning' in Hollywood in the post-Trump America. People have been questioning some of the excesses of shows like Game of Thrones by that time: Euphoria was infinitely worse in that regard by the end of Season 2 – and no one in Hollywood said boo.

I think by the time Season 3 debuted and by necessity the characters were all essentially twenty-somethings that the critics were forced to realize something that made so much of their raves about the first two seasons. Once all of the characters were adults and in the adult world, then it became very clear just how absurd the show was. All of the storylines Levinson told in Season 3 were even more ridiculous then in the first two seasons but now what seemed like insight into teenagers now really did seem like a bunch of whining Gen Z young adults.

By this time the bloom was well off Levinson as a writer. His follow up series The Idol had become arguably the biggest disaster in HBO's history of original programming, a show so horrible the network canceled it without ever even running the final episode. Levinson was getting horrible behind the scenes press from people who'd worked for him and there were constant complaints that many of the actors such as Zendaya and Sweeney weren't speaking. There was huge anticipation of the third season, mainly because of how he had chosen to shoot it and the storyline.

It became clear almost immediately just how terrible the final season was: critics turned on it with an incredible hostility even though the ratings remained as high as ever. And its worth noting by the time Season 3 debuted HBO had transformed yet again.

During the 2020s HBO had moved far closer to the working-class dramas of its first Golden era. To be sure The White Lotus and The Gilded Age continued to look at the wealthy but there was more of a humanity to it then we got with Iannucci's work. The Last of Us was a different kind of apocalyptic show, more based on paternal relationships and how love makes us do horrible things than zombies. The previous year Somebody Somewhere, one of the great shows in HBO's history, had come to a conclusion and Hacks a far more charming comedy was one of the network's greatest performers. And The Pitt  had just managed a Best Drama victory because it took place in a real world, not the one of Euphoria.

Even in the leadup to Euphoria's final season HBO was continuing to illustrate how the network had changed. Task had been a huge success, examining the messy world of crime and the FBI and Tom Brandis was a complete contrast to the antiheroes that HBO was known for. Knight of The Seven Kingdoms was a complete different side of Westeros, one that seemed more interested in ordinary men becoming knights then struggles for the Iron Throne. And just before Euphoria debuted America fell in love with DTF St. Louis, a series that also involved bizarre sexual fantasies and the internet but had none of the pretension of the former show and didn't take itself seriously for one moment.

Compared to those series the heavily stylized world of Levenson didn't just seem like it came from a different era, it seemed fake and utterly behind the times compared to what the average viewer was getting. The story of Rue's struggles with owing $150 million dollars to her drug dealer from the start of the show seemed like a parody compared to what we'd seen Tom Pelphrey doing during Task. And compared to how silly and light the struggles the love triangle at the center of DTF St. Louis was Sydney Sweeney's OnlyFans market honestly seemed, well, childish. (The conclusion of that story paled compared to how a similar one played out in the Season 4 finale of Industry a few months earlier.)

And all of the horrible mutilations and deaths that followed throughout Season 3 just really seemed like they were par for the course for any other HBO drama during the last quarter of a century. And the series finale didn't even seem like it had any connection to the show those who had stuck with it to the bitter end had started with. It seemed like it belonged in a different show altogether. Season 2 of True Detective was subtler than the finale of Euphoria.

And it basically destroyed the one good character throughout the entire series. Colman Domingo's sponsor of Rue really did seem like he belonged in a different series then this one.  I never believed that anyone would spent so much time trying to help a girl who relapsed time and again, who betrayed his faith over and over, who made it clear she absolutely didn't want to be saved.  There's no way I can read the series finale as anything but how Rue destroyed yet another life along with all the people she hurt during her struggles with addiction.

That's the biggest problem I have with Euphoria. If Levinson's story was just that of an addict and how perilous the journey  is, he could have told this story far simpler in a film. Instead he took three seasons to basically tell you what anyone could have taken away by the end of the Pilot. Rue was a hopeless addict and she was going to destroy anyone who came into her orbit. If the show had ended with her finally turning around it would have been one thing. Instead Levinson took the longest, ugliest and most exploitive journey possible between two points – and then tried to sell her death as some kind of happy ending. There's only one thing worse then a morality tale and it’s a morality tale that doesn't even have a moral. And that's what Levinson gave us over three seasons.

When I get back to it I'll never understand what so many people saw in Euphoria for so long. All I know is what I saw in it was an exploitive demonstration of excess that bordered on child pornography written by a nepo baby who had nothing to say and who HBO allowed him to keep saying it for three seasons over the better part of seven years. Its clear the cast has a great future in front of them and based on all of their non-Euphoria projects they all clearly deserve the accolades come for them down the road. As with so many actors in projects I dislike its clear to me that for performers such as Sweeney and Domingo the show was holding them back from their true potential and I'm glad to see them realizing it in other works.

As for Sam Levenson, whatever buzz he had from the early seasons starting dying after The Idol and the final season almost certainly crushed it. I hope that HBO is done with him after this. They've already made it clear the kinds of dramas they're airing now and have in their lineup are not the kind of shows Euphoria is and the network will be better off for it.

And for the love of God HBO, never do another teen drama again. Stick to what you're good at. Which at this point is basically everything but teen dramas.