Photo: Patrick Wymore/HBO

Every generation gets its own Euphoria. The first season aired in 2019, the last summer before the world shut down. Lying in my best friend’s bed, head on her shoulder, cat purring under my palm, she clicked on the piracy site she used to stream movies. We were 16, the same age as the characters on the show. I didn’t usually like teen dramas. They felt flat to me, obviously designed by adults trying to cash in on their own adolescent nostalgia.

Euphoria was different. It captured something elusive about what it felt like to be young, particularly a teenage girl, living through a time when our future seemed like an afterthought. Emotions on the show were played to the extreme: A petty fight between best friends was as severe as major betrayal; commonplace teenage heartbreak was an all-consuming void of despair. The stylized cinematography and costume design forced viewers to ride the highs with the characters and empathize with their struggles, triumphs, and search for identity.

There’s a version of Euphoria where the characters mature alongside their audience, where they grapple with early adulthood during economic collapse, and their relationships are explored with nuance and curiosity. But that version of Euphoria does not exist.

At 23, watching Euphoria’s third season feels like both witnessing a humiliation ritual and undergoing one myself. Everything I loved about the first two seasons, which I spent countless hours defending to parents and friends and strangers online, has been systematically destroyed by an overeager showrunner desperate to prove his auteurism. It feels like this show is laughing in my face, mocking me for daring to have become attached to it in the first place.

I’m not the only one who felt the connection. Euphoria averaged over 6 million views per episode in its first month and a half, had the highest HBO viewership in history for the premiere of its second season, and cemented Sydney Sweeney, Jacob Elordi, and Zendaya as bona fide stars capable of managing mature material. It tore through American classrooms like a kid out of breath. Teenagers at my Bay Area high school showed up in metallic eye shadow for third-period English, posted Labrinth songs on their Instagram Stories, and assigned the roles of Cassie, Maddy, Kat, Jules, or Rue to their friend groups, Sex & the City–style.

My attraction to the show went beyond the aesthetic. For the first time, I saw my own experiences reflected back to me with unflinching specificity. I watched Rue relapse and struggle to keep it a secret and remembered the guilt I felt the night I learned my friend was sent back to rehab, that she had been dosing for months in secret and I hadn’t noticed. I saw Jules’s assault by an older man in denial of her real age and thought of my classmates, 16-year-old girls with baby faces and fake ages on their Tinder profiles. I watched Kat slip precariously into sex work and remembered a friend from freshman year of high school, who disappeared halfway through the semester after her parents found out she was being lured into a sex-trafficking ring.

Drug use was widespread at my school, not unlike the suburban Southern California high school on Euphoria. In my four years there, I watched my childhood best friend surface sporadically as she went in and out of rehab for cocaine addiction. Overdoses at parties were so common the school kept medical personnel on standby at prom. Someone at a graduation party the year before COVID had to be hospitalized after the acid she took turned out to have enough molly to cause a seizure. Self-harm and mental-health issues were rampant. Three of my friends attempted suicide in two years.

I didn’t have the words to express what was happening around me. But Euphoria did. It stripped bare an essential truth: that beneath the glitter and the parties and the drugs was something violent, carnivorous. Euphoria gave me a window into my own reality; it promised that I wasn’t alone. I could pin my hopes for my and my friends’ futures to the girls onscreen and set them soaring away from me. If the Euphoria girls could get better, maybe we could too. Then the third season aired.

The women in Euphoria are now shallow parodies of themselves. Cassie, whose arc initially revolved around being used for sex and discarded by the men in her life, is a neo-trad OnlyFans wife whose dialogue sounds like it was ripped from a blackpill sub-Reddit. Her husband, Nate, who strangled her best friend in the first season and blackmailed another character with her own nudes, has been thoroughly declawed, framed as a sympathetic, hardworking man who doesn’t want his fiancée to resort to posting hole on main to pay for wedding flowers. When they get married in episode three, Cassie is depicted as so vapid that she cares more about ruining her perfect wedding day than the fact that her husband’s face has just been violently bashed into the floor in front of her.

In season one, Jules and Rue had the most realistic relationship I’d ever seen as a young queer woman. Years later, Jules, who had come out as a lesbian earlier in a between-season special episode and proudly declared her desire to go off hormone blockers, is back to dating men as a sugar baby (one man says he loves how her body looks as if she never went through puberty). Rue, who is directly inspired by Levinson’s own experiences in and out of rehab as a teenager, is a flat stereotype of a lesbian, eyeing the strippers in the club she’s been trafficked to, unaware that she herself is vulnerable. The only female character Levinson seems to have less antipathy for is Maddy, provided she also profits off women’s bodies via cam-model management. So far, nearly all the women in season three are pushed into some kind of sex work, either by financial forces beyond their control, villainous drug traffickers, or each other. Under it all is an increasing sense of humiliating desperation.

Euphoria seems to actively enjoy degrading its female characters and wants viewers to enjoy it too. In the first episode alone, we are treated to a two-minute-long sequence of Rue and Faye, played by former porn actress Chloe Cherry, shoving balloons of fentanyl down their throats, retching and drooling the entire time; a shot of Faye from behind after she inevitably shits herself, where a dog comes up and licks shit out of her ass; and an uncomfortably long close-up of woman, dead from an overdose, lying half-naked on a carpet while foam pools in her mouth. Levinson’s women are shallow, promiscuous, and degenerate. They don’t deserve a thoughtful narrative because they have nothing inside of them worth exploring.

The girls I knew who lived like Euphoria characters are adult women now. Some of them have gotten better; some of them haven’t. But the women in Euphoria are not allowed to grow up. They’re bound to their perpetual adolescence, punished by the narrative for things that happened to them as teenagers. It’s too bad that even as Euphoria hurdles into a post-high-school timeline, Levinson refuses to let his now-grown women graduate.

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