“Art should be dangerous,” a character says in the season two finale of HBO’s Euphoria, a show whose storytelling channels the spirit of a drunkard driving over the speed limit, in the dead of the night, after having sawn the seatbelt right off his car. Alternately criticised for glorifying bad behaviour and favouring ‘vibes’ over valuable insight—although it is praised just as often for being an authentic representation of the teen experience—Euphoria has always taken pride in being provocative.
Watching the first season, I was often reminded of its fellow teen drama Skins—think of it as the millennial version of what Euphoria is to the Gen Z—not because of the shared debaucherous DNA; and not because of the perspective-changing structure or the quiet soft corner that both shows have for musical numbers; not even because Euphoria, like Skins, is basically a sizzle reel for future stars. I was reminded of Skins because underneath its gaudy exterior, it was just as compassionate about its characters as Euphoria is about the rambunctious boys and girls who snort their way through its multiple storylines.
After an over two-year hiatus because of the Covid-19 pandemic — creator Sam Levinson directed two standalone specials centred around the characters Rue and Jules in the meantime, as well as the feature film Malcolm & Marie — Euphoria returned last month with a new eight-episode season. The show has doubled down on the sensory overload approach that Levinson has been perfecting since his underrated film Assassination Nation. In other words, if you find that Euphoria is not to your taste, you should know that it is probably too late to make that argument out loud.
Levinson has directed each episode of season two, unlike the last time, when he shared duties with Augustine Frizzell, Jennifer Morrison and Pippa Bianco. In that regard, these eight new episodes are a truer representation of his manic vision, for better or for worse. The runaway success of the first season has also afforded the production certain luxuries, the most obvious of which is the approval to shoot on 35mm film. This gives season two an entirely new texture—not just superficially, but also thematically.
This allows for Levinson and his cinematographer Marcell Rév to lose some of that digital sheen from season one, and to heighten the inherent dreamlike tone of the series. If the first season of Euphoria was like the start of an all-night bender, season two feels like waking up in a ditch somewhere.
It’s a drop-dead gorgeous show featuring drop-dead gorgeous people—a stark contrast to the self-destructive behaviour on display. Rue’s relapse is perhaps the A-plot, while the Nate-Maddy-Cassie love triangle becomes somewhat tiresome after a while. Cassie’s sister Lexi, meanwhile, discards her supporting character energy and channels her newly assigned lead character status in a season-long arc about her putting together a play on her life. This concludes with a two-episode fever dream of a finale, in which Levinson unleashes some of his most flamboyant filmmaking without ever losing sight of what the show has always been about—friendship, regret, and second chances.
Euphoria, as Levinson probably knows better than anyone else, is always more interesting after it sheds its attention-hungry outward appearance and embraces the core of what it actually is—an inward-gazing character study about broken people.
But far too often, the show lets the exteriority overpower everything else. It’s a purely surface-level observation, but after having scored the 35mm film, Levinson appears to have promptly dialled up the grainy visual aesthetic that only celluloid can produce. Euphoria is a show that revels in the maximalism—the colours are oversaturated, the camera is perpetually coked-out and characters have a tendency of casually saying things like, “It’s just heroin.”
But they’re also capable of great insight—or, at least, Levinson is. “Reducing someone’s life to a moment, an ugly moment, and punishing them for it, that’s what cops do,” says Rue… ruefully, in episode six. She’s in the middle of a painful withdrawal, after the events of a stand-out episode five that will likely win Zendaya her second Emmy. We’ve just caught her at a bad time; she’s probably at her worst. And all she wants is to not be judged for who she is right now.
But while Rue runs around in circles—appropriate for an addict, I suppose—the show tempers this repetitiveness with a tender new storyline that treads the tonal tightrope that has come to define this show. Lexi and Fezco are nothing like each other—they share character traits, not interests, as he astutely points out in one scene—but theirs is the purest relationship on the show. It represents not just the cautious optimism that occasionally pokes its head out from behind the chaos, but also gives Levinson an excuse to break out his trademark there-can-be-no-happy-endings mentality.
Like most teenagers, these characters are convinced that what they’re feeling is permanent. It isn’t. It’ll go away, but it’ll likely be replaced by something equally brutal. As an elder millennial who can empathise with the younger generation, Levinson has taken on the responsibility of helping them swallow this bitter pill. God knows he’s aided them in abusing drugs before. He makes dangerous art.
Euphoria Season Two
Creator – Sam Levinson
Cast – Zendaya, Hunter Schafer, Jacob Elordi, Sydney Sweeney, Maude Apatow, Angus Cloud
Rating – 4/5