The third season of Euphoria has been almost impossible to ignore for anyone with a smartphone. The HBO drama, which started in 2019 following a group of hedonistic, privileged teens, has evolved into television's answer to rage-bait, creating moments specifically designed to dominate news feeds with memes and outrage. Even before the season finale, viewers have witnessed OnlyFans storylines, pup play, sugar daddies, mummification fetishes, a disastrous wedding, severed fingers and toes, venomous snake attacks, cockatoo assassinations, gangster shootouts, and several characters being buried alive.
In season three, Euphoria picks up five years after the characters graduated from high school. At times, the show has felt lost outside the high school setting, exploring a confusing mix of genres and plots, some criticized for glamorizing misogyny and violence. Yet despite these criticisms, the show has a track record of taking bold artistic risks, which is becoming rarer in a content landscape that values quantity over quality. It turned creator Sam Levinson into one of Hollywood's most exciting and polarizing visionaries and catapulted a new generation of actors into the A-list, to the point where they now seem to have outgrown the show. As season three concludes, Euphoria represents a strange and very 2026 contradiction, feeling both ridiculous and undeniably influential.
A Shift in Perspective
This season of Euphoria has taken me on a journey. For the first three episodes, I was aghast that virtually all female characters pursued lines of work revolving around male pleasure or servitude. Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) begged her husband Nate (Jacob Elordi) to let her do OnlyFans. Jules (Hunter Schafer) dropped out of art school to become a sugar baby fulfilling the fetishes of married men. Rue (Zendaya) started working for a ruthless strip club owner as a drug mule. As I wrote last month, it felt like the show took strong-headed young women and turned them into a shallow, manosphere-inflected fantasy, where women only engage with men for money.
In episode four, my view started to shift when the show began to question whether women can truly be empowered this way. Kitty (Anna Van Patten), a dancer at the strip club owned by Rue's boss, is sexually assaulted by a group of clients in a private room, an ordeal a horrified Rue watches via security cameras. Then in episode five, an episode so outrageous it needs to be seen to be believed, where a giant Sweeney rampaged around skyscrapers like Thotzilla, we see Cassie launching an OnlyFans and going to great lengths to fulfill her customers' fetishes. Nate, her once highly possessive husband determined to provide for her, slowly starts to see her as a cash cow to clear his debts. He even encourages Cassie to film an erotic video with a male influencer with 30 million followers, just so she can send him more money. They both risked so much to be together, but now their relationship is reduced to a transaction.
The Attention Economy's Grip
As Cassie pursues virality at any cost, she and Maddy (Alexa Demie), her former bestie turned manager, purposefully try to create controversy, staging various engagement-bait stunts. The angrier these idiots get, Maddy says, the more money you make. At this point, I realized that Euphoria was trying to explore the misogyny of the attention economy, the media landscape we all participate in, which rewards polarizing figures with cultural relevance. Watching the show, I found myself thinking about the generation who have grown up with extreme creators like Andrew Tate and Bonnie Blue, both Frankenstein creations of the attention economy. How has that shaped their view of the world?
Euphoria's choice to focus on how algorithms strip us of our humanity is distinctly meta, not least because Levinson has been known for using shock tactics to draw attention to his work. It also feels fitting that Sweeney is right at the center of the show. In 2025, her American Eagle ad campaign caused a political firestorm, with critics accusing her of using whiteness to sell jeans. The political right, including Donald Trump himself, promptly rallied around her, while American Eagle's stock price soared. Sweeney has since capitalized on this attention by launching her own underwear brand, SYRN, which Cassie wore on Euphoria while cosplaying as a dog.
Chloe Cherry, who plays the vulnerable runaway Faye Valentine, also has a life story that foreshadowed the show. When Cherry was 18, she began starring in adult films and later built a presence on OnlyFans before moving into acting. When I interviewed Cherry earlier this month, I asked her about the fine line the show treads between glamorization and critique. In my opinion, she said, I think Sam is using these young women as a vessel to show how society currently sees young women. I think Sam's trying to say: Look where we have got to in society.
Thematic Struggles
While its portrayal of women is subjective, what is less so is that Euphoria's third season has struggled thematically. The show is part horror, part gangster movie, part Tarantino thriller, and part soft porn film, sometimes all in the same episode. Watching it has felt like having three separate conversations with the same person, on different messaging apps, at the exact same time, in all caps. Some characters have been infuriatingly flattened. Jules was once so central to the story but has spent this entire season as a side character lacking her own voice. Nate was a fascinatingly layered young man who seemed like he might be using the armor of machismo to hide much more complex and possibly queer feelings. But in season three, he was reduced to his debts.
That said, even the loudest critics of Sweeney would be foolish to argue her portrayal of Cassie hasn't been masterly. And the return of Cal, Nate's dad, the final on-screen performance of actor Eric Dane, who died in February, was particularly poignant. At his son's wedding, Cal was confronted with his secrets, mistakes, and squandered potential. But overall, Levinson seems to have forgotten that Euphoria was built on the complicated personal relationships between its characters, which is how the show launched a new generation of stars.
Legacy and Conclusion
If this ends up being Euphoria's final season, then the show's legacy is hard to define. The first two seasons existed in their own world, offering a social portrait of teen life that was purposefully vague and dreamlike, to the point where it was never even confirmed which state the characters lived in. Then came season three, hyper-specific to today's media moment: TikTok houses, OnlyFans, and the nihilistic pursuit of online clout. It's a warning to a generation that has been raised not to expect anything from anyone.
I suspect that the show might end up being Gen Z's equivalent of Lena Dunham's Girls, which tapped into a sense of generational unease in the 2010s, when my generation of millennials were entering the workforce. But while Dunham's high-cringe comedy satirized the last gasps of Obama-era optimism, Euphoria drags us deeper into the malaise. It portrays an algorithm-driven Lord of the Flies, where young people are encouraged to view life as a series of transactions, where empowerment can only be achieved by scamming other people. It's not comfortable viewing, but when the world feels so broken, how could it be? Euphoria's season three finale airs on HBO Max on May 31 in the US and Australia and on June 1 in the UK.
