Euphoria

HBO

Euphoria returned for its third season after an implausibly long four-year break last night, which made it seem like the cast would never reassemble, especially given how many of its actors’ careers had skyrocketed in the interim. But creator Sam Levinson rounded them up for one last season that starts out…quite poorly, with one bright spot, at best.

Euphoria season 3 takes place years after season 2, mainly so these 27 to 35(!) year-old actors are no longer attempting to play high-schoolers. It’s split them up decisively, more or less, and one didn’t show up at all yet, Hunter Schaefer’s Jules.

What followed was a premiere that blended about three different shows, where none of them felt like Euphoria, and neither did the final package.

The main storyline is how Rue has become a drug mule in order to pay off an impossible debt, but she ends the night attempting to get into the prostitution game, as a supervisor, not a participant. The whole thing, desert drug running and dangerous criminals, is very Breaking Bad, but despite how weird it is that we’ve gotten here, Zendaya puts on a really fantastic performance as Rue, working with the material she has, and she carries the premiere. And she needs to.

Easily the weirdest part of the night is this “suburban hell” storyline where Cassie and Nate are married, he’s scamming to keep his father’s construction company afloat, while she’s upset they are not richer, and plans to turn to OnlyFans to earn fast cash, specifically to pay for $50,000 worth of flowers for their wedding.

This entire thing feels like the plot of some sort of demented sitcom, but the storyline could work, at least potentially, if not for what is a stunningly phoned-in performance from Jacob Elordi, literally months off his Oscar nomination for his role in Frankenstein. He seems beyond bored here to the point where this version of Nate, who became a borderline evil character in past seasons, is dulled and, as some on social media are saying, “lobotomized” so that he feels like an entirely different character. Sweeney, whose star has rocketed up in Hollywood with hits like Anyone But You and recently The Housemaid, is put in the embarrassing position of crawling around like a dog in lingerie, and as we know from trailers, doing bizarre, borderline creepy OnlyFans content like dressing up like a baby. It begs the question, “Why would she agree to this?”

We don’t really see enough of Maddie and Lexi to form any real impression of their storylines. Jules is said to now be a “sugar baby,” though her absence is keenly felt as one of the show’s most interesting characters. But in addition to the strange storylines and performances in the show, it is noticeably missing the soundtrack from Labrinth, the musician that scored the last few seasons and has gotten into some sort of unclear dust-up with the series to the point where his music isn’t anywhere to be found, replaced by Hans Zimmer who…let’s say this new music is part of the reason this Euphoria doesn’t really feel like Euphoria at all now.

Granted, this is just the first episode, and things may evolve from here, but trailers are showing us Rue wielding M4s and the aforementioned Cassie baby outfit, so I’m not getting my hopes up. I don’t know what this show is, but it’s a shadow of what it was, at best.

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