I had mentioned in my post about Sydney Sweeney’s recent career that she made her big break in the Zendaya TV series Euphoria, where “it was announced that Euphoria will continue in Season 3, picking up on the characters years later as they moved through time (I don’t think ‘grew up’ is the right term for these people). “
Well, that finally came out on HBO last Sunday. Much like the Trump regime, it remains an depressing cycle of immorality and self-destruction. And much like the Trump regime, it is impossible to stop watching.
Zendaya plays Rue, a recovering drug addict who starts this season lost in the middle of Texas and gets rescued by a kind family of born-again Christians. She explains in retrospect that she got there when Laurie, one of her high school teachers turned drug dealer, tracks her down for a stash that Rue’s mom found and ended up flushing. Laurie tells her that with interest, the cost is several million dollars but she “rounds” it to $100,000 which she knows Rue can’t pay either. So Rue and her friend Faye get roped into being Laurie’s drug mules. Rue talks with her AA sponsor and tells him about her contact with the farm family, and he says that should inspire her to start thinking about a higher power. Rue ends up taking a shipment of fentanyl to “Alamo”, a strip-club mogul and likely pimp. But while Rue parties with Alamo’s girls, one of them dies from a bad batch and the guards accuse Rue of deliberately poisoning her. Rue says she certainly wouldn’t stay if she’d intended to poison anybody and maybe this whole thing could be God’s way of sending her a sign. Alamo likes her attitude and decides to test her with “the William Tell act.” He shoots an apple off her head successfully, but this sets up a conflict with his crime empire and Laurie’s.
Rue is not in contact with most of the cast, and in the premiere, most of them are mentioned only in passing. Their lives are more secure but they aren’t much happier. In Season 2, which I haven’t caught up on, Nate (Jacob Elordi) ended up choosing Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) over Maddy (Alexa Demie). Nate ended up inheriting his Dad’s construction business after he went to prison, and is now a breadwinner with cars, a fancy house and housekeeper. But his contracts are being held up by bureaucracy and he isn’t making that much money. He certainly isn’t making enough for Cassie, who wants to stage a romantic wedding that they can’t afford. So she tells him she wants to make her own money by posing on OnlyFans. Of course Nate is dead set against this but changes his mind when Cassie cajoles him by opening her blouse. Which makes sense. For most heterosexual men, if Sydney Sweeney offered to show us her tits, we’d assassinate the Pope.
The other member of this triangle, Maddy, has her own career inside Hollywood, but she isn’t making much money either, and the season preview indicates that she hooks up with Cassie again when Cassie asks to hire her as her agent for the OnlyFans project.
The fact that this had to pick up in real time five years later not only creates a gap in the story, it demonstrates that time has moved on, and probably left this show behind. Angus Cloud, who played the befuddled but beloved Fez, died of a drug overdose in 2023. In this season, Fez was written out by being sentenced to prison. Barbie Ferreria, who played Kat, one of the cooler characters, isn’t in Season 3 at all. There were rumors that the cast were in conflict with creator Sam Levinson over some of his decisions, like producing the even more negative and transgressive series The Idol. Alexa Demie has questioned whether she will be in Season 4, if there is one. And Zendaya, Sweeney and Elordi have all moved on to bigger and better roles that do not require their characters to suffer masochistic spirals of sex and drug abuse (well, Elordi was in Wuthering Heights, and Heathcliff is slightly more masochistic than Nate).
In the meantime, the season is just starting, and the audience doesn’t know where it’s going to go or how fucked up it’s going to get. So again Euphoria is analogous to current events: It passed its age five years ago, but it’s still going on, it’s even more dysfunctional, we still keep watching and we don’t know why.