Series Review · HBO · 2019–2026 · 3 Seasons · 24 Episodes
Euphoria
Euphoria is over. Three seasons, 24 episodes, seven years, and one of the most divisive shows HBO has ever made. And now that it is done I can sit with all of it at once and try to say something honest about what it was.
Season 1 was great. Season 2 was perfect. Season 3 was the weakest by a significant margin. And the finale was one of the most emotionally overwhelming hours of television I have watched in years. All of that is true at the same time.
Season 1 — Great
Season 1 arrived in 2019 and felt genuinely new. The visual language, the non-linear storytelling, the way it handled addiction not as a plot device but as a lived experience, it was unlike anything on television. Zendaya's performance as Rue Bennett announced her as one of the best actors of her generation in a single season. She was 22. She won the Emmy. She deserved it.
Season 2 — Perfect
Season 2 is one of the finest seasons of television of the decade. I will not walk that back. The Rue and Ali episode, directed entirely as a two-hander between Zendaya and Colman Domingo in a diner, is as good as television gets. The Lexi play episode. The Cassie and Maddy storyline handled with more complexity than most shows manage in an entire run. Season 2 found the emotional core that Season 1 was reaching for and landed it with precision.
Season 3 — The Weakest
Season 3 jumped five years forward and struggled visibly to figure out what it wanted to be. There were disgusting moments. Not shocking, not daring, disgusting. Too sexual in a way that had nothing to do with boldness and everything to do with indulgence. I am a fan of this show, which is exactly why I say that with frustration rather than dismissal. There is a difference between depicting something and wallowing in it. Season 3 wallowed.
The season was uneven in a way the first two never were. New characters took up space without earning it. Some storylines went nowhere. Sam Levinson seemed at times to be making a different show from episode to episode. And then the finale arrived.
The Angus Cloud scene wrecked me completely. The show handled his memory without being maudlin, without exploiting his death, with genuine love and grief woven into every frame.
The Finale — In God We Trust
Episode 8 is the best episode of Season 3 by such a distance that it almost makes you forgive everything that came before it. What Zendaya does in this finale is simply extraordinary. The scene between Rue and Ali, Colman Domingo at his absolute best, is the kind of moment that television builds towards for years without always arriving. This one arrived. I sat through it barely breathing.
And then the Angus Cloud scene. Angus Cloud died in July 2023 at 25 years old. The way the show handled his memory in the finale wrecked me completely. That scene alone earns the finale its place.
Zendaya and Colman Domingo will not miss at the Emmys. That is not a prediction, it is a statement of fact. Their work in this finale is the standard against which performances get measured.
The Verdict
Euphoria was a show about what it feels like to be young and broken and searching for something to make the pain stop. At its best it was one of the most honest portraits of addiction and loneliness that television has produced. At its worst it mistook suffering for meaning and indulgence for daring.
Zendaya grew from a remarkable young actress into one of the finest performers alive in front of our eyes. Angus Cloud is gone and his absence made the finale grieve for him the way we all did. That is worth something. That is worth a lot.