At the end of this episode of Euphoria, an enraged Alamo Brown, dressed in his best cowboy gear, rides a horse full-tilt towards Rue Bennett, who’s buried in the ground up to her neck. As he draws closer, she realizes he intends to swing a croquet mallet right into her exposed skull. 

This is more or less what this season of Euphoria is doing to the concept of restraint. It’s an unceasing onslaught of the tackiest, trashiest, most sensational, most spectacular images of sex, violence, and the people who make their money off them both that creator Sam Levinson can come up with. The result feels like what TikTok would be in Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. You can count shows that have ever gone this hard on one hand. What you do with the other is up to you.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Euphoria for Decider.

Obviously, we’re very far away from high school relationship drama, even the intensely fraught and drugged-up version from Euphoria Seasons 1 and 2. Would the show have taken off like it did without that near-universal backdrop of adolescent angst? Probably not. Does that mean its reincarnation as a black-comedy crime drama about a group of former and current(ish) friends, all of whom are about as dumb as a pillowcase full of doorknobs, doesn’t work? Oh hell no — this is a destination hour of TV for me.

With the new status quo now established for the core characters, creator-writer-director Sam Levinson can make big jumps in the plot like the ones we saw here, while maintaining the show’s usual maximalist blend of arty trash and trashy art. There are bright white shots in this episode that are positively Kubrickian, there’s a rom-com makeover montage, there’s penis graffiti, there’s a high-stakes poker game, there’s a stomach-churning running theme of women being treated as disposable, and there’s a funeral for an assassinated cockatoo, complete with a tiny coffin. Euphoria Season 3 like a safe full of pills: Some are pick-me-ups, some are poison.

I reviewed this week’s Euphoria for Decider.

Like Cerberus, guard dog of the underworld, this episode of Euphoria is a three-headed monster. It follows three cohesive storylines, each centered on the show’s most charismatic and famous actresses: Zendaya, Hunter Schafer, and Sydney Sweeney. Each one is a crime story, to one extent or another, and each one is lurid, violent, or both. It’s like the King Ghidorah of trash. I mean that as a very high compliment.

I reviewed this week’s Euphoria for Decider. Show’s good!

Cal, Faye, and Cassie really get dunked on in particular, but Nate is portrayed as a sweaty loser and Jules as a vaguely sinister femme fatale, while neither Maddy nor Rue’s behavior makes you particularly fond of them. The OnlyFans shoots are horny as hell, the language is laden with bad guy–appropriate slurs, a pig shits live on camera, Chloe Cherry groans about someone’s big cock in front of a swastika flag, on and on it goes.

Is it shock for shock’s sake? Admittedly I’m mostly with Cassie on these things as a matter of principle: When a friend of hers tells her that people are into sick shit, she replies “I know, right??” with audible excitement. Hell yeah, sister! That said, when you remove these characters from the supposedly sacrosanct setting of adolescence, it really does change everything. Rue and her friends are no longer teen tragedies, they’re just adult assholes. 

But that’s the point. What’s really shocking in an era when many fans judge the quality of a show by how good it makes their favorite characters look? All these people are assholes. Their experiences didn’t make them wiser, they made them more cunning. They are eager to exploit and willing to be exploited. That sucks. They suck. And that’s good television.

I reviewed this week’s hilariously mean-spirited episode of Euphoria for Decider.

Euphoria is lurid, overheated, violent, fetishistic, hyper-stylized, cynical, sentimental, melodramatic, druggy dirtbag action trash, so of course I love it. But it’s not hard to see why this has come to be the position of an increasingly beleaguered minority. Even putting aside the show’s lengthy-for-a-million-reasons absence from screens and writer-director-creator Sam Levinson’s “where there’s smoke, there’s…well, there’s smoke” air of disreputability, one need look no further than Stranger Things to see how critical fortunes can shift when the stars of a high-school drama age up. That show still at least pretended to be set during high school. What is Euphoria now?

I reviewed the season premiere of Euphoria for Decider.

Right there you can see that Cloud’s range is astonishing, and this is what the contention that “he’s just playing himself” gets so wrong. Cloud and Fez may have had a similar vibe in casual conversation. But to access the comedic timing required to pull off that blackly hilarious interrogation scene, in which he conveys the largely accurate idea that the Jacobs’ lives are even more fucked up than his own? To convincingly portray a guy so thoughtful and attentive that a good girl like Lexi would grow closer to the town’s top drug dealer than to any of her own girlfriends? To voice the audience’s anguish as the adorable little psychopath Ashtray goes down in a hail of cop bullets? And to seem like exactly the right person for the job in every scenario? Any one of these tasks requires real talent, real effort, real work as an actor. Cloud did it all, and did it so seamlessly and so absent of ostentation that many viewers didn’t even notice his labor.

And when I say he’s the gateway between Euphoria-as-melodrama (complimentary) and Euphoria-as-thriller (also complimentary), I mean it. Take a look at the episode I consider to be the show’s masterpiece, the fifth ep of Season 2, “Stand Still Like the Hummingbird.” It’s a showcase for Zendaya first and foremost, as she first has a mortifying emotional battle with her friends and family when, first at her house and then at Lexi and her sister Cassie’s, they attempt interventions to get her clean. It’s absolutely savage work by Zendaya, as raw and riveting as any of the New Golden Age dramas of yore.

But by the end of the episode, all the manipulation and gaslighting and guilt-tripping is over. Rue’s no longer lambasting her mother for being a shitty parent or accusing her best friends of betraying her or airing out other kids’ dirty laundry to take the focus off of her — she’s on a high-speed foot chase with the cops, breaking into houses, jumping over fences, landing in catctuses, and generally participating in crime thriller antics. Again, the transition is so seamless that you barely realize you’re suddenly watching a different kind of show until you’re knee-deep in some unsuspecting family’s backyard with the police on your tail.

What happens in between? Fez. When Rue has exhausted all of her family and friends, it’s Fez she turns to. When she tries to rob Fez’s grandmother’s meds, it’s Fez who turns her away. She approaches him via the show’s first brand of ugliness, the reality of addiction and confrontation, and departs him for a journey deep into the second variety, the heightened kill-or-be-killed reality of a Boogie Nights, a Pulp Fiction, an American Psycho. Fez is the fulcrum.

I wrote about the late Angus Cloud and his crucial, wonderful work on Euphoria for Decider.