Four-and-a-half years after the second season of Euphoria, Sam Levinson finally delivered. The third and final season of Euphoria was its best, a blown-out and expansive vision miles ahead of the entertaining but limited high school melodrama of the first two seasons. As I wrote in April, “Levinson, determined to ‘evolve or die,’ deconstructed Euphoria and turned it into a fever dream, both a parody of and an answer to the rest of the series.” Rather than take the typical route and follow the characters as they move from high school to college—or a normal, well-adjusted adult life—Levinson threw his characters into an American epic spanning drugs, crime, politics, pornography, religion, and Hollywood. The first seven episodes of season three were stellar, and although the show dropped whatever “Brechtian” airs it may have had in the first episode, it remained involving, unpredictable, and consistently more interesting and entertaining than previous seasons.
But the series finale was something else. This was the best I’ve seen on television since Twin Peaks: The Return, although they’re not comparable; David Lynch and Mark Frost made a show about their show 25 years after it ended, whereas Levinson was contracted for a final season despite the fact that all of the actors had aged out of their roles and, in the interim between seasons, become movie stars. Zendaya, Jacob Elordi, Sydney Sweeney, and Colman Domingo have been everywhere for the last few years, while Maude Apatow just directed her first film (Hunter Schafer and Alexa Demie have had less work). Who wants to see them skulking around some campus in Toronto? They’re movie stars now, so Levinson put them in a movie, and it was better than any movie released this year.
It was impossible not to think of Quentin Tarantino throughout this season, especially whenever Alamo Brown (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) showed up with his cowboy hat and his very specific cadences. Tarantino’s initial influence on mass culture—characters passionately arguing about pop culture apocrypha—used to be more obvious, but it’s become so engrained it’s no longer his tic alone. Now, seven years after Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the most recognizable ripoff in something like Euphoria is the way characters talk, not what they talk about. This season had plenty of gunfights and absurd deaths, all of which were preceded by exchanges written with a certain syncopation that’s immediately recognizable. Watching the finale of Euphoria felt like a glimpse into an alternate universe, one where Tarantino is still making movies, unrestrained by his own self-imposed limit.
Euphoria doesn’t have the depth of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, although it does share an actor (James Landry Hébert, who played Clem Grogan in Tarantino’s film). What the show lacks in depth and subtlety, it more than makes up for with remarkable panache and an extraordinary atmosphere. Levinson has a keen visual sense, and although there were shades of this in previous episodes, the finale was on another level, comparable to prime Michael Mann or Brian De Palma. The notion that Levinson isn’t one of the most talented and compelling directors of his generation is another example of today’s largely unquestioned bias against confident white men; I have zero doubts that a black director or a female director would’ve been praised for putting the exact same show on the air. But Levinson is a straight white man, and “right-wing coded” no less, so he’s “evil,” “a villain,” and, most absurd, “a bad writer.”
The final season of Euphoria was a profound and bracing display of ambition, a high-risk high reward proposition that succeeded, unlike most of its characters. So many end up dead, including lead Zendaya’s Rue, because according to Levinson, “people like Rue don’t make it.” After losing star Angus Cloud to fentanyl in 2023, Levinson crafted a season-long eulogy for him, and the show gained additional resonance when Eric Dane died earlier this year. Both appear, with Cloud in archival footage and Dane in his last on-screen appearance, clearly sick. There was no way to revisit Euphoria without involving the events of the last four years, from the sky-high success of its leads to the tragedy of its supporting players (not to mention tensions between Levinson and the cast, at least Zendaya, rumored but never corroborated).
This could’ve been pointlessly provocative, preachy and didactic, or a simple misfire, but ultimately Levinson ended his show with one of the greatest series finales ever, a 92-minute episode of TV that looked more like a movie than anything else this century. Unlike so many contemporary filmmakers, Levinson isn’t afraid to address the moment and talk about America; his technical bravura has even been questioned, part and parcel of his “unearned confidence.” Sour grapes from people who don’t know anything about filmmaking or really care at all; it may not be “Euphoria high school,” but who cares? When it’s this exhilarating, who cares who made it and why?
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NARCFILM