Euphoria Season 3 is completely different. Somehow, it works.

It’s been a hectic four years since Euphoria was last on our screens. When the show—HBO’s hit series about a teen addict, Rue (Zendaya), and her first romance—premiered in 2019, it became a part of the zeitgeist seemingly overnight. Viewers, especially Gen Z fans, were enthralled by the show’s LGBTQ+-heavy portrayal of adolescence as a battle against myriad dependencies, from drugs to sex to toxic relationships. It helped that the show was awash in pearlescent pinks and blues and had an overall look that played right into youths’ current-day obsession with the Y2K aesthetic. The series was also ground zero for heaps of star power, helping launch the careers of young actors who were, at the time, little-to-moderately known—Zendaya, Jacob Elordi, and Sydney Sweeney, to name a few—and who have since become major Hollywood players. Euphoria was dark, but also glitzy and exhilarating, earning the ire of D.A.R.E. for supposedly glamorizing addiction. But the show also faced other pushback, including against Euphoria’s creator and showrunner, Sam Levinson. As two specials and a second season unfurled, there was talk of the too-long breaks between seasons only resulting in diminishing returns. Another blow came in 2023, with the heartbreaking untimely death of Angus Cloud, one of the show’s most notable cast members.

Fans had been ready to throw in the towel on Euphoria when it was confirmed that the show would be returning for a third season, which premieres on Sunday night. The question on everyone’s minds is whether the series can still stand under the weight of its own reputation. With so much time having passed, and so much having changed, have viewers—especially those who may have been in high school or college when the show premiered—outgrown this story? After all, Zendaya is now one of the biggest stars in the world—certainly she has outgrown this teenage-trauma plot. How was Euphoria going to justify all of its misfortunes (and fortunes) after all this time? The only possible way forward for Euphoria was to come back as something completely different. Luckily for all of us, it has.

Today’s Euphoria, if the start of Season 3 is any indication (critics received only the first three episodes for early viewing), drops us into what feels like a whole new world. The kids are now adults, after a five-year time jump since Season 2, but they’re still very much not all right. This chapter starts with a great opening sequence of Rue smuggling fentanyl across the Mexican border; she’s trapped in a dangerous situation with some seriously nefarious people, and her sobriety remains one big question mark. What follows is a much grittier story—even if certain parts of it are cloaked in the bright golden hues of daytime in the desert—that is divorced from Euphoria’s former youthful metallic pastels. Instead, this updated version focuses more on sandy homages to Westerns and the classic neon-signed plazas as visual markers of a seedy Los Angeles. Even the sound is different: Due to some undisclosed bad blood between Labrinth and the Euphoria producers, the British singer-songwriter’s iconic music, which became synonymous with the show, no longer underlines the narrative, and he is not involved with the series. (Composer Hans Zimmer, of all people, is there to pick up the slack, to surprisingly good effect.)

But it’s not just Rue who stands in the quagmire of growing up and realizing there’s still so much more to figure out. Goody-two-shoes Lexi (Maude Apatow) is trying to work her way up the ladder behind the scenes in Hollywood, while former high-school HBIC Maddy (Alexa Demie) feels like she has the potential for so much more than her job as a junior-level manager for rising talent in entertainment allows her. There are rumors that Jules (Hunter Schafer), Rue’s high-school love with whom she has fallen out of contact, is a sugar baby. Finally, Cassie and Nate (surprisingly still together, after their Season 2 romance destroyed their relationships with Maddy, Cassie’s former best friend and Nate’s ex) are navigating contentious wedding planning amid Cassie’s suspicion that Nate might be withholding more about their financial predicament than he lets on.

All of the characters are unhappy, struggling, or wanting in some way, whether big or small. Some of those big ways feel dark: We’re talking illegal or violent levels of dark. That lack of light—more noticeable due in part to the unavoidable and deeply felt absence of Angus Cloud, the show’s heart of gold, whose character, drug dealer Fezco, is explained away as being locked in jail—defines this new season. While previous seasons certainly didn’t shy away from heavy material, the story now feels so dark, so void of hope or happiness or genuine love, that at times it comes across as something closer to a horror series.

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Fortunately, there are a few new characters in this VistaVision world to entertain us. A pimp and strip club owner named Alamo, played by Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, takes near center-stage this season, flanked by his lackeys, played by Marshawn Lynch and Darrell Britt-Gibson, whose tight-lipped, affectless Bishop is one of the season’s best new additions. There’s even an unexpected appearance from actor Kadeem Hardison, who plays a strip club manager this season, but whom Zendaya die-hards may recognize as Zendaya’s father on her Disney Channel show K.C. Undercover.

Some viewers may miss the Euphoria they fell in love with, all glitter eyeshadow and high-school angst. But I think this was the best possible way that Euphoria could have overcome the losses and changes it was forced to push through in the time between seasons. Both the people who make the show and the people who watch the show are different now—it only makes sense that the show itself should be, too. If anything, the new version feels more representative of what Euphoria’s tongue-in-cheek title was always meant to convey. The state of euphoria was something the characters were perpetually chasing, but never managed to attain. Out of all the seasons, this latest one feels truest to that cruel irony.

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