By TeeJay Small
| Published
Now that Euphoria‘s long-awaited third season has finally arrived, it feels like a weekly ritual has formed around the show. With the release of every new episode, fans, critics, and haters take to social media to discuss how the HBO melodrama has gone completely off the rails. While I won’t argue that the show is sticking to its roots by any means, I would be remiss if not to point out the fact that Euphoria was a completely insane series long before Sydney Sweeney started eating out of a dog bowl. In fact, I’m not sure what being ‘on the rails’ would even look like for this bizarre teen sex drama.
Euphoria Was Always Over The Top
As early as the very first episode, Euphoria is a strange series. The show focuses on sex, drugs, and rock and roll, but does so through the lens of a Southern California high school. Personally, I’ve always felt that these stories would make way more sense in a college setting, because I don’t recall seeing a lot of briefcases full of heroin getting kicked around my AP lit class back in the tenth grade. Maybe I was just a square back in the day, but I also feel like stories of female empowerment through sexual sovereignty play better when the woman is above the age of consent.
In the first season, there’s a whole plot line about a young, heavyset girl discovering her worth by becoming a nude cam model. From her own perspective, this makes her a certified baddie, but watching it as an adult highlights the predatory nature of unchecked internet access among teens. She may not consider herself a victim, but she’s a teenage girl whose self worth is entirely determined by her value to gross creeps in weird chatrooms.
I’m sure there are plenty of people who had drug problems and sexual adventures in their early teenage years, but that should really be considered the exception, not the rule. It’s important to note that most high schoolers are still shouting “six seven” down the hallways and watching people open Pokemon cards on Twitch for some reason. Not every show needs to be hyper realistic, but Euphoria always struck me as predatory in the dark and dramatic way it depicts children.
Unhinged Since Day One
Of course, even the adult characters aren’t safe from Euphoria‘s madness. One of the strangest plot lines in the show (or perhaps in television history) centers on Eric Dane’s Cal Jacobs. Throughout the first season of the show, Cal is shown to be a domineering construction magnate responsible for building half the town. In season two, he is struck about the head by a child of a single-digit age with a sawed-off shotgun. The bludgeoning results in a concussion, which causes Cal to go home to his family and dramatically declare that he’s gay now.
While explaining that he’s a concussed homosexual, Cal pees all over the floor of his own foyer, in front of his children, as some kind of bizarre, animalistic show of dominance. He then departs his home to go live in an unfinished house in the middle of nowhere. Later in the season, we see that he has situated himself in a community of homeless gay men, who go around using unfinished houses as sexual meeting places. I cannot stress to you enough that my description actually makes this whole plot thread less absurd than what plays out on the screen.
From the perspective of a day one viewer, I actually think Euphoria is less insane today than it was back when Cal Jacobs was literally pissing away his familial legacy. Sure, Sydney Sweeney‘s character seems to exist primarily for series creator Sam Levinson to screen test his barely-disguised sexual peccadilloes, but at least she’s doing it as an adult character now, thanks to a time jump between seasons. Zendaya‘s character is similarly troubled with a major drug trafficking operation, but it makes more sense now than it did in season one, when she was supposedly playing a 16-year-old.
In fairness, I think that the main selling point of Euphoria has always been its absurdity. The show exists to ruffle the feathers of social media users, who then drive more traffic to HBO with their complaints. It just seems like people have forgotten that now that the series is less about high school plays, and more about Sydney Sweeney putting on a diaper and using ableist slurs.
Euphoria is streaming on Max.
