‘Euphoria’ Season 3 review: It should be good. On the contrary, it is bad.

“Anyone can reinvent themselves.”

These are threatening words Euphoria Season 3 new Alamo (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje). He’s talking to Rue (Zendaya) as she reaches a crossroads in her winding journey to editing, but she might as well be explaining series creator Sam Levinson’s thought process going into Season 3. In this case, renaming is the name of the game, as Euphoria ranging from gritty teenage drama to seedy neo-Westerns.

On the other hand, some kind of renewal is necessary. EuphoriaThe Season 2 finale aired four years ago. After that hiatus, it would be ridiculous to go back to high school as if nothing had changed, especially since, during that time, members like Zendaya, Jacob Elordi, and Sydney Sweeney blossomed into megawatt movie stars in decidedly non-high school roles. On the other hand, Levinson’s preferred approach Euphoria Season 3 opens the show up to its worst ideals, marring its technical brilliance and solid performance with a troubling storyline that feels connected to the internet’s anger.

Euphoria Season 3 doesn’t feel like Euphoria you know.

The average period is five years Euphoria Seasons 2 and 3 shake up the show in a big way. The main characters of this show spread out until they were adults. Others, like Nate (Elordi) and Cassie (Sweeney), settle down and get married. Others, like Lexi (Maude Apatow) and Maddy (Alexa Demie), chase success in Hollywood.

Rue’s life has taken a very dangerous turn. His debts to drug dealer Laurie (Martha Kelly) have caught up with him, and he’s now a drug mule. The exciting season opener caught him traversing the Chihuahuan Desert on his way back to the US, complete with a tense hole in the border wall. Zendaya sinks right back into Rue’s telephonic energy, making it seem like we never left her.

However, there are many other factors Euphoria those around them have changed. Gone are the neon-filled school hallways and city streets, replaced by Western vistas filled with stunning color. The brilliant words of Labrinth’s school are nowhere to be heard. Instead, Hans Zimmer takes over with more orchestral sound (which at times can be heard surprisingly close to his work A mound). Even the title of the show appears in a different font: a blocky yellow reminiscent of Western film titles. This season features the drop of the original title card and the cry of the hawk, another addition to the Western pastiche that brings back the new direction of the show.

All the changes work on Levinson’s idea that these characters in their early 20s are the Wild Wests of their lives. (In Rue, caught in the crossfire between Laurie and strip club kingpin Alamo, that lawless Western is all too real.) Yet in making all these changes, Euphoria and it loses parts of its identity that set it apart from its theatrical counterparts in the first place. Now it sounds like a typical crime drama. A honor a crime drama with an HBO budget, but still watchable.

Euphoria Season 3 is an exercise in demeaning and idolizing.

Sydney Sweeney in “Euphoria.”
Credit: HBO

One thing for Euphoria that carries over into Season 3’s exciting envelope-pushing, especially when it comes to sex. In Season 3, Levinson focuses on sex work, a topic she’s already explored in part (but less sympathetically) in Kat’s (Barbie Ferreira) Season 1 storyline for Girls . In this case, sex work is at the center of many issues. Rue helps run one of the Alamo’s strip clubs. Jules (Hunter Schafer) becomes a sugar baby. Cassie makes changes to the OnlyFans, all hoping to earn enough money to pay for the flowers of her dreams for her wedding to Nate.

Euphoria Season 1 portrayed Kat’s girlhood journey as primarily empowering, with very little attention paid to the fact that she was young at the time. Season 3 flips the script, turning Cassie’s now grown-up OnlyFans desires into an overtly sexual scandal. If you thought Season 2’s embarrassment of him was endless, his Season 3 introduction alone blows it out of the water. Dressed as a dog, he sits on top of a small doghouse and laps water into a bowl, seeking validation on the Internet. Between this and “Accommodations in Wuthering Heights,” a big year for Elordi’s female-dominated characters playing pets. Fitting, as both Emerald Fennell and Levinson thrive on the empty provocation of throwing obstacles at a wall and seeing what sticks.

Cassie’s sex work has no depth to it, and in the “right-wing suburban bubble,” everyone piles on the shame, from her boyfriend to her friends. Euphoria it does not question these biases or examine the complexity of sex work further. Instead, it’s fun to keep the scandal coming, using Cassie’s desires as a springboard from which to launch sexually suggestive images designed to stir up a lot of controversy: Cassie wearing a wet American flag shirt, or pretending to be a baby. That Sweeney – himself a cultural lightning rod – in these table structures Euphoria‘s desire to be angry is even clearer. And while I can clearly hear some of that anger being fueled by this show, what I feel most is anger. Annoyed that a show with incredible potential, and undeniable talent in front of and behind the camera, keeps opting for lazy horror.

This shock even spills over into Rue’s news program, which it often does Euphoria very nice and very self-centered. In Season 3, Rue explores religion and surrenders to a higher power, a quest that stems from a dinner conversation with Ali (Colman Domingo). Euphoria he wisely knows that if he sticks Zendaya and Domingo in a booth and lets them play alone, he gets magic. That’s why Rue’s special episode, “Trouble Doesn’t Last,” is a series highlight. But in the first three episodes of Season 3 sent to critics, Rue’s journey to fulfillment often falls by the wayside to make more room for it. Euphoria Scholars will make people talk more: chaos and conflict. In Rue’s case, those are reflected in her work at the strip club, which has few fully formed characters and more sadistic sex worker archetypes.

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But even in non-sexual situations, Euphoria it finds a way to look at its characters. The previous series saw Rue and her partner Faye (Chloe Cherry) swallow golf ball-sized bags of drugs to smuggle them out of Mexico. The camera rests on their throats and necks, while their asses growl loudly and desperately. It is a spectacle that suggests unnecessarily, and the same happens in what happens when medicine needs to come out on the other side.

Unfortunately, it’s scenes like these that stick in the brain and get an endless amount of meme therapy. Euphoria you know this, which is why it’s so fun to continue to tease Cassie and give a high-profile look at controversial topics in Season 3.

There’s a good show hiding in here somewhere. Rue’s many adventures attest to that. However Euphoria it keeps covering that dimension with something worse, and that’s something no amount of innovation can hide.

Euphoria Season 3 premieres April 12 at 9 pm ET on HBO and HBO Max.