Now that Euphoria‘s long-awaited third season has finally arrived, it feels like a weekly ritual has formed around the show. With the release of every new episode, fans, critics, and haters take to social media to discuss how the HBO melodrama has gone completely off the rails. While I won’t argue that the show is sticking to its roots by any means, I would be remiss if not to point out the fact that Euphoria was a completely insane series long before Sydney Sweeney started eating out of a dog bowl. In fact, I’m not sure what being ‘on the rails’ would even look like for this bizarre teen sex drama.
Euphoria Was Always Over The Top
As early as the very first episode, Euphoria is a strange series. The show examines sex, drugs, and rock and roll through the eyes of a high school in Southern California. Because I don’t recall seeing a lot of heroin-filled briefcases being kicked around my AP lit class in the tenth grade, I’ve always thought that these stories would make a lot more sense in a college setting. Maybe I was just a square back in the day, but I also feel like stories of female empowerment through sexual sovereignty play better when the woman is above the age of consent.
A whole storyline in the first season centers on a young girl with a heavy build who finds her worth as a nude cam model. This makes her a certified baddie from her perspective, but watching it as an adult reveals the predatory nature of unrestricted internet access among teens. Although she doesn’t think of herself as a victim, she is an adolescent whose self-worth is entirely determined by how valuable she is to gross creeps in strange chatrooms.
I’m sure there are plenty of people who had drug problems and sexual adventures in their early teenage years, but that should really be considered the exception, not the rule. It’s important to note that most high schoolers are still shouting “six seven” down the hallways and watching people open Pokemon cards on Twitch for some reason. Not every show needs to be hyper realistic, but Euphoria always struck me as predatory in the dark and dramatic way it depicts children.
Unhinged Since Day One
Of course, even the adult characters aren’t safe from Euphoria‘s madness. One of the strangest plot lines in the show (or perhaps in television history) centers on Eric Dane’s Cal Jacobs. Throughout the first season of the show, Cal is shown to be a domineering construction magnate responsible for building half the town. In season two, he is struck about the head by a child of a single-digit age with a sawed-off shotgun. The bludgeoning results in a concussion, which causes Cal to go home to his family and dramatically declare that he’s gay now.
While explaining that he’s a concussed homosexual, Cal pees all over the floor of his own foyer, in front of his children, as some kind of bizarre, animalistic show of dominance. He then departs his home to go live in an unfinished house in the middle of nowhere. In later episodes of the season, we learn that he has joined a group of homeless gay men who meet sexually in abandoned homes. I cannot stress to you enough that my description actually makes this whole plot thread less absurd than what plays out on the screen.
Euphoria actually seems less insane now than it did when Cal Jacobs was literally destroying his family’s legacy, from a viewer’s perspective from day one. Although the character of Sydney Sweeney appears to exist primarily for the purpose of allowing series creator Sam Levinson to screen test his barely disguised sexual inclinations, at least she is currently acting as an adult character due to a time jump between seasons. It makes more sense now than it did in season one, when Zendaya was supposed to be playing a 16-year-old, because her character is also plagued by a significant drug trafficking operation.
To be fair, I believe that the absurdity of Euphoria has always been its main selling point. The show’s purpose is to upset people on social media, who then send more people to HBO with their complaints. It just seems like people have forgotten that now that the series is less about high school plays, and more about Sydney Sweeney putting on a diaper and using ableist slurs.
Euphoria is streaming on Max.