Euphoria HBO show

Also new season of Euphoria, back to reiterate that I'M OLD and don't understand the youngers

The general take I've seen on Twitter (based on soundtrack choices etc.) is that this show is very much an old person's look at These Kids Today With Their Depression And Their Hippety-Hop Music.

― but also fuck you (unperson)

We've been watching the show from the start, really because we just give all the HBO shows a shot. At first I would have agreed with the above but the kids are actually watching this show. My 13 year old niece got in some trouble this last week when her parents discovered she had been watching it because all her friends are into it too.

As far as the series goes this season had been pretty intense with some great acting sprinkled into questionable plot lines and unbelievable situations but i'm still watching.

anyways though it should have its own thread

a teacher at euphoria high pic.twitter.com/OueXD4J7P2

— Maggie? Winters? (@saggiesplinters) January 11, 2022

i don't think i've ever even seen a teacher on the show tbh

I've mentioned my pet theory before, that I suspect a lot of these shows are written or created by people just far enough out of school that they sort of remember it, but not quite so close that they have any real idea what's actually going on right now. Their desire to shock or push boundaries is in essence an attempt to be the Cool Parent, the old person who totally gets it, man, unlike all those other lame, square adults.

I should ask my kid what she thinks of it, though I know in the past she's liked a lot of other ott high school set or high school age shows (Riverdale, Outer Banks, Shameless (?)) *because* of their melodramatic ridiculousness, not because of their finger on the pulse accuracy.

also a big part of this shows success is the actors themselves becoming quite popular and of the moment

The show is actually quite good. How ~true~ it is to the teenager of today is kind of a silly thing to get caught up on, of course it’s heightened and is (shocker!) made by adults. Kids, for better or worse, are definitely watching it, so it’s speaking to them on some level.

Like the movie KIDS was immensely popular with kids, even though it was nothing like what most kids (including myself) were going through at the time.

i love this show

Was "Kids" popular with kids? Let alone "immensely" popular with "kids"? I mostly remember a lot of hand wringing that it *could* be popular with kids. I was a Gen X-er in college at the time, so of course neither I nor none of my friends saw it, since we all just cynically assumed it was bullshit.

also can you imagine if some of us (mentally ill, queer, neurodivergent, drug users) had a show like this to watch when we were in high school? i see so many reactions like "wtf is this, i went to math club in high school and one time drank one beer" and i'm like fine normie that's cool but some of us were fucked up and hung out with people even more fucked up. not gonna lie i had a much tamer and cushier adolescence than these kids but some of us go through some hard shit when we're teens.

i was a kid (12 or 13) when kids came out and we fucking loved that movie. we were not having sex that young but the drinking & smoking and skateboarding and trying to act 25 when you're 13 resonated

yeah the vibe as Marsha's apartment is definitely a little too familiar to some places i found myself stuck in xp

one of the highlights this season was the Fez and Ashtray back story for sure! love those guys

Just caught up with the last episode. Intense.

Yeah, this show rules.

I was a teen in the late 90s and early 00s and yes KIDS was very well known, at least in my sphere.

yeah the vibe as Marsha's Laurie's apartment is definitely a little too familiar to some places i found myself stuck in xp

sorry fixed

Gerry Rafferty's Right Down the Line all over tiktok cuz of this show a funny thing

man this show went off the rails plotwise even though I found it highly entertaining. but nate redemption arc not good. and it made a huge deal about rue not getting into rehab and then kind of just went "oh but I was sober the rest of the year" uh ok?

most watched HBO show behind Game of Thrones now

season fell off majorly after the peak of ep 5 when rue is on the run

lexi's play going on more than one episode was excruciating

kind of a drag that instead of revisiting the paths of some of its most interesting characters -- jules! kat! even rue, honestly, her arc was kind of abandoned after ep 5 as we endlessly flashed back to the post-funeral gathering at her house -- it became this insular, self-referential drama with maude apatow at the center of it

agree, even though I like maude apatow and I thought the absurd staging of the play LOOKED incredible.

3 episodes in and my immediate takeaway is that i have zero shock over any forthcoming fallout from people involved in the show.

Angus Cloud’s family releases statement on his passing to TMZ:

“Last week he buried his father and intensely struggled with this loss. The only comfort we have is knowing Angus is now reunited with his dad, who was his best friend. Angus was open about his battle with mental… pic.twitter.com/7m2CkSkXxR

— Pop Base (@PopBase) July 31, 2023

https://variety.com/2024/tv/news/euphoria-season-3-delay-rewrites-time-jump-zendaya-script-notes-1235955045/

Sources tell Variety that Levinson, who exerts full creative control over the show, writing and directing every episode, proposed his vision for the season in winter 2023, featuring a time jump five years into the future for the former students of East Highland High School. HBO thought his pitch and early drafts for the season — which included meaty arcs for Sydney Sweeney and Jacob Elordi that a source described as “very compelling” — were a strong start. But after the WGA strike ended, and as the full scripts began coming in, they didn’t pass muster with Zendaya, “Euphoria’s” two-time Emmy-winning star who is now 27 years old. 

...

When Levinson turned in his revised scripts in late 2023 and early 2024, HBO execs were now the ones feeling unsatisfied. There was a new arc for Zendaya’s Rue, whose character in Levinson’s first pass had been relegated to the background in a somewhat surprising storyline about her working as a private detective, which HBO had immediately vetoed. Among many other ideas for the rewrites, Zendaya had pitched an idea in which Rue, who is now sober as a twentysomething young woman, would be a pregnancy surrogate. But insiders say the new scripts simply didn’t feel like the show tonally.  

...

Although Zendaya has yet to read Levinson’s new scripts, sources say the third season isn’t dead and could very well come together. HBO has freed up the cast for the rest of 2024, promising to come back to them on Oct. 1 with a solid plan to begin filming in 2025. The shoot, if were it to happen, would tie up the cast for 25 weeks, and the season will likely be reduced from eight episodes to six — though if Levinson were to need more, HBO is open to it.

They should jump it forward 10,000 years and set it on a planet full of magic sand and giant worms.

the show people should buy some of those brain boost smoothies. you can get them at whole foods. maybe that will give them ideas for how to do show.

The next season should be about high schoolers abusing brain booster smoothies and then competing against each other to get into college. (I have never seen this show, for all I know that's what it is about.)

haha, this show is never coming back now

Omg to imagine it occurred to Levinson to turn Rue into a private investigator

he saw some Veronica Mars and was like... yes, let's do that

if Zendaya was a private detective masquerading as a pregnancy surrogate, they would have greenlit the script

kind of insane that this IS coming back in April, and the returning actors are the ones who definitely don't need the show for their careers (Sweeney, Elordi, Zendaya)

in retrospect, it's trash with trauma underpinning each character, in different proportions than someone like a Ryan Murphy would attempt? I rewatched some old nip/tuck episodes a while ago and it's roooough. Euphoria is more manipulative in its trauma

also I'm pretty sure Levinson and everyone else involved will continue to pretend that THE IDOL never happened

the Idol is fucking hilarous to look back on, one of the worst things HBO has ever produced, it's impressive how bad it is.

a long enough gap between s2 and s3 that not one but two actors died in the interim (angus cloud and eric dane, tho it sounds like the latter shot at least some scenes for s3).

The Idol also has a cast that certainly captures its moment (The Weeknd, Rachel Sennott, Hari Nef, Da'Vine Joy Randolph, Troye Savan, Moses Sumney). And Jane Adams is fantastic in it.

There are a few hints in the casting (Jane Adams being the obvious tell) and a few other bits that make me think Amy Seimetz was bumped out of The Idol at a later stage than they tried to pretend. It’s just amazing how *boring* some longer scenes are, and those are the ones that make you question whether there’s any semblance of a coherent plot

Season 3 debut was actually a total hoot, I'm looking forward to this (presumably final) series. I think evolving this past high school was a good idea. Entire opening scene with the border fence was some Breaking Bad shit.

yeah was better than expected (expected a total disaster and it was fun and watchable). zendaya is just extremely watchable, gives the show a higher floor tha it should have. elordi clearly has no interest being there, but hopefully he has more to do as the season goes on.

i think I'll enjoy this the more off the rails and insane it gets

watched the first episode of this season and found it hard to get over how uh leering the camera is. the drug balloon swallowing scene looked like it was filmed for a fetish website. also the characters have no direction and barely resemble themselves. but yeah it's a trainwreck i'll keep watching

oh god and rue and alamo really bonding over sexualizing women felt offensive to me as a lesbian. felt like levinson filtering his male gaze through his main character and it was basically out of nowhere. all right time for episode two

eagerly awaiting your thoughts tbh

lol was it because of the sexy baby scene? again would be fine if it weren’t filmed by a creep. but also like… why are all of these plot lines so static and boring and only really turned into anything at all by the face acting of zendaya and sydney sweeney

nah, just general thoughts on the whole deal

everyone else does feel like they're just around to provide context, even if they gave Maddy a job and a minor plot point. now that I think about it, it was just a setup for her to jump back in -- _real_ influencer content has professional photographers and editorial direction, whatever the hell Sweeney's character is doing just does stuff and is photographed by her maid

I absolutely do not need more thoughts or commentary on the baby thing

there was more of rue being like "i'm basically a man! i objectify women!" in this episode and i basically find that repulsive beyond belief

also i think i'd get a lot more out of being constantly exposed to levinson's various fetishes if he weren't high-key moralizing about it. entire vision of this season seems to be "guy masturbating but telling himself that he's a bad, bad boy the whole time"

it seems like the writing was leading in a direction of some sort of playboy/hustler dichotomy of creating a creative, faux-classy persona to present to the public with Maddy's designs on that one model, to the extent she's setting her up with one of the agency's real influencer clients, even if it's a facade

Cassie's the other approach where it's "I'm just throwing out (gross) ideas you perverts might like because it gets me the clicks" and the idea of having a cohesive shtick never occurred to her, with the "do you see?!" line dropping when she just asks "who am I?", just the writing once again hammering in a nail that's well past set but reminding us after so many years

girl, we've already had two seasons of this complete identity crisis. you're Nate's girlfriend or fiancée or whatever. we're probably not going to resolve this in one season. this show is glossy trash, we're just getting shown different flavors of trash to make us think it's interesting

tbf watching the show itself is still interesting, but we already know what happens when this team tries something different than "hmm, makes u think"

latest episode was pretty godawful, like a cassie/nate wedding that goes very wrong should be pretty easy to execute, but there's so much tonal fluctuation that it's less like "this show is secretly a comedy" and more like "this season is directionless and has no idea what it wants to be, and that makes every theoretically emotional beat it hits feel false." and all of the stuff with rue is SO BORING wtf

so are they going to keep running with the story that Fezco is chilling in prison or are they going to poorly kill him off offscreen

disagree on all counts, I'm finding this season fully entertaining across the board

the writing is so bad tho

acting still great across the board i gotta say, elordi even appeared to do something this episode

the Zendaya expositional voiceovers have always been pretty hilariously bad

I don't think she show has ever been 'well written', levinson is not a very good writer honestly.

he’s a bad writer but idk the western stuff is like a further slide into me being embarrassed on his behalf

i like the actor who plays bishop

(bishop is alamo's stoic, bird-murderin' lieutenant)

Yeah loved the whole bird scene

jules dick-painting plotline painful to witness

wtf was that shit?

jules once again in the episode for five seconds so that something humiliating can happen to her

i'm going to finish this season but we are at a stage of entropy here that tests even my patience, nothing is happening and nothing is worth caring about

getting the strong impression that levinson didn't know what to write for the last season and just rewatched the last couple seasons of breaking bad and some other faves for notes

there's two and a half hours of this season/show left and we just burned most of an hour giving the backstory of a character introduced this season as an extended warning

stg if they're using this "lexi, you know your sister's story better than anyone, you should write the episode" as an excuse to just recapitulate the season as a show-in-a-show episode the same way they did with a stage play previously....

they really may as well have just not included Jules in this season.

I did like the death that happened in this episode though.

yes i suppose i spent this whole season wanting nate to die bc he'd become a totally useless punchline character

i guess at least instead of having jules go through insultingly stupid and humiliating experiences, we now are putting maddy through it (by which i mean, her fucking alamo to save cassie????) for some reason

genuinely consider this one of the worst things i've ever watched with the most production value. that final scene was fucking endless

in a show where everything is excessive i was surprised to think “hmm that was excessive”

sorry that was re: nate

there’s only one character who isn’t totally put through the wringer and it’s lexi, because she’s the designated outsider or something?

lexi's fight with rue was terrible writing, less two characters than two vague concepts in an argument with each other

the knowledge that i can’t possibly write anything this bad has given me the confidence i need to finish my novel

jules, grieving, painting the ugliest fucking portrait of rue imaginable

This was so bad jfc

eh, it (the finale) could have been a lot worse. it's tense, entertaining, and sobering, at the very least. Rue / Fezco's televised parkour prison escape (pipe dream) was bittersweet and humorous. Ali's loss of faith and subsequent action was satisfying on some level, to some degree

on the topic of addiction- the hour-long, "special episode part 1," with Rue, Ali / Martin, and the diner staff person, is solid gold, throughout. this hit me harder than any recent dramatisation (of the last five years) of dialogue about addiction. the naive rationalising and short sightedness, in the face of reality (wisdom gained from age, experience) was realistic and effective. it's unfortunate that only an alternate, truncated version of this scene was used in one of the early episodes of this season.

entertaining??? the one throughline this season is how fucking boring everything was. bunch of pointless torturously-written standoffs, rue should've died in episode four

the sequence that preceded rue's death was the most beautiful in the whole season, and it was essentially like... hey, do you remember the show euphoria? specifically the first season of the show euphoria, that you liked so much?

you could almost see the storyboards for the season being shuffled into place as they revisited all the pieces that didn't work throughout the season that were half baked or probably introduced at a late hour so they could tie things off in this way

Hunter Shafer probably shouldn't plan for a career in art

it would be very funny if they cheaped out and she actually did that finished painting

Hunter Shafer did do the Jules paintings in this season.

oh no

I did wonder how much leverage different actors had on negotiating their return this season. Doing the painting bit and being mostly remote from the rest of the proceedings minus one episode where they got the majority of the core cast in one setting is probably a win, all things considered

in retrospect I think it's clear that Levinson wasn't super interested in Jules as a character after season 1. Hunter Shafer wrote the special episode that was focused on her, and that was pretty much that. Likewise, I think Levinson wasn't super iterested in Nate, or most of the other characters either... starting with Season 2 this was really a Rue and Fez story, and then Angus Cloud died which derailed everything. I get that people are upset at the short shrift some of these other characters got, but it stopped being their story a long time ago.

so much of it was wrapped up in family dynamics and creepy projection of adult takes on what teenagers are like on to the teenagers on the part of Levinson et al. the parents being a mess or at least being present was the backstop for so much. all we got from the parents stepping away was "look how messed up this generation is. the parents failed" but without any sort of feedback

Israel Daramola is one of my favorite newer writers and boy, he didn't hold back:

https://defector.com/rip-to-euphoria-hbos-dumbest-show?giftLink=14d35b447ee26cc85275e7f0a2efdd86

i think one thing i want to call out is in ali's monologue late in the episode, where he says "empathy for the addict means you have to have empathy for the dealer." no you don't! no one thinks they have to have that!!!

and it's like the crux of the whole fucking monologue

an evil idiot wrote this show

i missed that he said that, but levinson is a recovering addict to his portrayal of addiction and recovery is informed by that.

it’s still a stupid line!

all of it eventually leading to breaking bread with a household of xenophobic christians over our shared love of god bc if we can’t do that then are we even a country. flag waves in the wind eagle cries

I think he said if you have empathy for the addict, you can also have empathy for the dealer, not that you have to. So he's rejecting empathy in favor of revenge. is that the right thing to do? I can't say. It's not what I would do.

is empathy for addict/dealer a philosophy in na spaces? i wouldn’t know, but idk i kinda think it’s the wrong idea and feels like it doesn’t reflect the material reality of the addict/dealer relationship inasmuch as they can sometimes coalesce into the same person (but that doesn’t seem to be ali’s point at all)

he just made it seem like something you were required to do, that he was done with

and i didn’t think it made all that much sense as an argument for what he does later in the episode. it’s overdetermined like everything about this season

it was pretty obvious halfway through the monologue that it was a clumsy plowshares-to-swords transition and we have to blame society at large for making a world where blah blah blah

the dirt farmer christian family somehow seemed dreamlike even among the other ridiculous things. has levinson heard of magical realism but not actually watched or read anything that incorporated it successfully? seems likely. probably too busy rewatching kill bill

hope the extras playing non-named employees at the strip club were paid decently

..and how criminal is it that Rosalía was in more of this than expected, probably because they filmed by scene in a block, but was mostly reduced to being the dancer with a neck brace? Not to mention Marshawn Lynch only getting a couple good lines

fuck this stupid alt-right coded bullshit, it really was a waste of time.

Everyone otm, terrible fucking ending, but I love Colman Domingo so I guess I’m glad he got a lot of this episode at least. But yes. This season was like that Trump tweet about continuing to drink Diet Coke even though it’s bad for you. Why AM I still consuming this garbage? Just a waste of time despite some interesting elements this season, but they mostly had nothing to do with the original concept of the show! All of the Alamo characters deserved a better show than this. Also, what was the point of Hunter Schafer being in this season at all?

there really was none, she should have declined to return but I'm guessing the pay was good for a very limited amount of work.