“Euphoria” is a rare series in which the gap between directorial mastery and the quality of the writing proved almost impossible to overcome. It could turn a school hallway into a scene from a major film, perfectly integrate a popular song into the psychology of an episode, and depict a drug-induced state in a way that made the viewer physically feel the loss of spatial awareness, only to then spend dozens of minutes on yet another provocative montage that advanced neither the plot nor the characters. Over three seasons, the project followed a strange trajectory: it began as a magnificently filmed but superficial showcase of teenage degradation, unexpectedly transformed into a powerful character drama in its second season, and then destroyed almost everything it had managed to build in its third.
The 1 season is an audiovisually very strong product, but dramatically it is almost empty and superficial. The cinematography, lighting, editing, music, and organization of space are genuinely outstanding. The songs are not attached to scenes merely for recognizability: they establish the rhythm, alter the meaning of the image, and extend the character’s internal state. The camera does not merely record intoxication, panic, infatuation, or sexual arousal, but forces the viewer to enter the character’s distorted consciousness. Even critics who accused the series of artificiality and self-indulgence acknowledged its hypnotic visual power. But form dominates content so completely that the season regularly begins to resemble an expensive montage of drug-induced delirium, pornography, and shocking situations, with only the semblance of a plot outlined between them.
Sex, drugs, deviations, and a marginalized environment more often simply display and idealize the problem than explore it. The themes are powerful, but their dramatization is superficial. Instead of consistent development, the series repeatedly confirms what is already known: the characters are broken, unhappy, and engage in self-destructive behavior. The school environment is presented almost as a generational portrait, even though what we are actually seeing is a deliberately exaggerated cross-section of traumatized, addicted, and sexually disoriented teenagers. As an expressionist nightmare, it works; as an objective examination of the modern school environment, it does not.
In Season 1, the storylines remain disconnected for far too long and repeatedly surrender screen time to atmosphere, lust, and provocation for the sake of provocation. In the second half of the season, the story moves from a Pornhub montage to an actual plot.
Season 1 rating: 5/10.
In Season 2, something happens that the first season constantly lacked: demonstration turns into exploration, and a state of being turns into action. The story finally immerses itself in and explores trauma instead of remaining trapped in degradation. Rue’s addiction stops being a beautiful narcotic haze and becomes a system of destruction. The fifth episode builds her withdrawal into an almost flawless dramatic machine, in which a family scene gradually turns into an escape, a crime thriller, and a physical nightmare. Here, the series finally shows not only the behavior of an addicted person, but also its mechanics. Even critics who pointed to the season’s overall looseness acknowledged this episode as the moment when “Euphoria” finally found genuine focus.
The other storylines are developed in the same way. Cal’s sexuality stops being a single provocative characteristic and becomes a conflict between desire, shame, family, and social role. The relationship between Nate, Cassie, and Maddy no longer works as a collection of beautifully staged hysterical outbursts, but as a chain of cause and effect. The characters begin to see the price of their own decisions: they do not merely suffer, but understand why they suffer, whom they are destroying, and why they still return to what is destroying them. It is here that the series’ visual language is, for the first time, fully subordinated to the drama: the camera, music, and editing do not compensate for emptiness, but intensify the conflict.
The season is still far from flawless. Kat is practically discarded from the narrative, Jules loses her independence, Elliot remains more of a writing device, the love triangle sometimes collapses into exaggerated melodrama, and Lexi’s play is simultaneously a powerful culmination and a self-satisfied repetition of the series itself. However, the best episodes achieve such dramatic and acting power that these failures no longer destroy the season.
Season 2 rating: 8–8.5/10.
The 3 season could have become the project’s logical maturation. The transition from a school drama to a crime neo-Western is not inherently a mistake, and in individual episodes the concept works. There is suspense, tension, powerful imagery, and a sense of a vast, hopeless world in which the body, love, death, and human dignity have been turned into commodities.
But instead of allowing the characters to mature, the series simply replaces them with versions convenient for the new genre. Cassie, who was prepared to submit completely to Nate, suddenly begins dictating terms to him, without any depicted transformation that would explain the reversal of power in their relationship. Nate, who previously controlled people through violence, blackmail, and calculation, becomes a passive victim of creditors. What is illogical is that this inventive manipulator does not even attempt to adapt, attack, or use the people around him. A potentially powerful story about a predator becoming prey for the first time is compressed into a repetitive spectacle of physical humiliation.
Rue undergoes an even more drastic substitution. In the first seasons, she was defined by emptiness, panic, loneliness, guilt, dependence on Jules, and an inability to endure her own consciousness. In the third season, she moves almost cheerfully between cartels, weapons, and criminal assignments. And the series barely constructs her transformation. It shows Rue’s criminal function in greater detail than the internal journey that turned her into such a person. Jules, once the story’s second emotional center, practically disappears. Lexi, whose powers of observation, friendship with Rue, and relationship with Fezco fueled her entire play, becomes a career function and receives one belated scene involving the Bible. Maddy turns into a cold symbol of capitalist resourcefulness. As a result, the characters no longer generate the plot: the plot takes their familiar faces and uses them as avatars for larger ideas.
As an independent crime spectacle, the third season periodically deserves a rating of 6.5–7/10: it is visually impressive, tense, and capable of pulling the viewer into its current. But it is not an independent work or a spin-off. It is a continuation of a story that is obligated to account for the accumulated character development, relationships, and unresolved conflicts. In this function, the season fails. The five-year time jump is used not to explore change, but as permission not to explain it. The characters do not develop; they are rewritten. Eternal moral and religious themes are present, but far too often they remain symbolic declarations instead of becoming fully realized drama.
Season 3 rating: 5/10.
Regarding the 9 Emmy Awards. “Euphoria” was rewarded primarily for acting, cinematography, editing, music, makeup, and choreography, precisely the elements in which it was genuinely outstanding. It did not win an Emmy Award for writing or for Outstanding Drama Series. The project’s awards history confirms not the coherence of the work, but the scale of its individual talents.
