Here’s a non-comprehensive list of all the things the women did in Euphoria season 3, episode 1.
Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) dresses up like a puppy and crawls around on all fours while her housekeeper films her for OnlyFans. Rue (Zendaya) and Faye (Chloe Cherry) swallow “balloons” of fentanyl and then must get them out via, well, the other end. Jules (Hunter Schafer) is unseen but apparently a sugar baby now, or as Maddy (Alexa Demie) so eloquently puts it, “a hooker.” In her capacity as a drug runner, Rue goes to a strip club to meet crime boss Alamo Brown (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), who tells her amid a sea of half-naked women that he’s in the “business of pussy,” which, he says, equals power.
Euphoria has never been subtle about its interpretation of modern sexuality and perennially been a show that pushes the limits. But as I watched a close up of Sweeney licking water out of a bowl and endured a frankly disgusting scene of Cherry and Zendaya experiencing, let’s say, stomach issues, in a car after swallowing the drugs, I had to stop and ask the question: Who is this show for, exactly?
When it premiered in 2019 Euphoria was seen as a cunning reflection of a generation of Gen Z teens. Created by writer and director Sam Levinson, it served, as The New Yorker wrote at the time, an “indictment of a damaged nation repressing the instincts of its children.” You may not have liked the depiction of modern young people as cunning, nihilistic, and reckless, but that didn’t mean some aspects of the show didn’t ring true to the generation it claimed to reflect (although, as the New York Times pointed out, statistically Gen Z was doing less drugs and having less sex than the generations prior).
But as time went by Euphoria only attracted more and more controversy. HBO was consistently asked to respond to claims of a toxic work environment on set during season two, with Sweeney defending what some viewers deemed her character’s excessive nude scenes. (“If we didn’t feel comfortable with something, or we saw something we didn’t like, we’d all speak up,” she told Variety in 2023).
Levinson’s next project, The Idol, only fueled the backlash as critics called the Lily-Rose Depp series about a fallen pop idol “degrading” and “disturbing.” And as four years passed between the second and third seasons of Euphoria, not to mention the rumors of alleged drama on set, some speculated if the show would return at all.
Euphoria season 3 episode 1 has aired, though, and now many fans are wondering what message they’re supposed to take away about the characters, now aged up five years, and where they have landed. Watching Cassie dressed up like a baby for an OnlyFans subscriber, as is teased in the season’s trailer, may be provocative…but is anyone really dying to watch that?
“As a longtime Euphoria fan, I was like WTF,” said one TikTok creator about the clip. “I don’t want to watch this shit.”
Over on Reddit, many fans were similarly left cold. Commenters described the season as “ugly,” “unnecessarily fucking gross,” and “weird fetish bullshit.” Of course, we are just one episode into the season, so opinions may change, and some defended the explicit scenes as no worse or different than in the past. But the overarching response from Euphoria fans online is that the episode had little depth.
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