Little Lives on Repeat

The final season (as confirmed by HBO) of Euphoria just finished airing, but it’s taken me this long just to get through the second season of the show. I finally managed to get through the two specials (focusing on Rue and Jules) at the start of this month, and then it felt like an absolute slog to get through the second season. Which felt strange since I actually found the first season to be quite compelling. Maybe not compelling enough to immediately dive into the second season (which was already out by the time I finished my first dive), but still I won’t deny that there was something there.

But it feels like with the second season something changed. It did take two years for the second season to come out, and if I had to bet I’d wager that the success of that first season got to creator Sam Levinson’s head. Not that it was entirely undeserved. That first season had interesting storylines coupled with dark themes, all strung together by artistic flair. Euphoria felt like nothing else on television at the time (which is HBO’s specialty), and Levinson deserved a fair bit of credit for that.

Success can change a person, and I think one thing that shifted for Levinson between the first and second seasons is that it made the writer / director think that every idea he had was solid gold. He’s the credited writer on every single episode of the series (only sharing credit on one episode, the Jules special which he co-wrote with that character’s actress, Hunter Schafer), and it’s pretty clear that Euphoria is his vision over and above anyone else’s. The show’s success is his success, and that led him to think that whatever ideas he wanted to pursue were going to be successes no matter what.

As an aside, this also led him to taking over on The Idol, grabbing that show back from the original showrunner, Amy Seimetz, and reshaping the whole thing into his own vision (shared with co-creator Abel "The Weeknd" Tesfaye). The resulting show was such a mess that the series was canceled after only a single, five-episode season. It also put a heavy stink on the writer / director, tainting everything he’s working on (and worked on) in the process. Going into this viewing of Euphoria’s second season, it was hard to view this as anything other than a show developed by a dude high on his own supply.

By that I mean that Euphoria’s second season is an absolute mess that pursues whatever random ideas it has, frequently never amounting to much of anything except noise. That’s not to say there are bad ideas in this season as some plotlines are strong and some of the artistic ideas at work in the show add something to the mix. But on the whole this season is weaker, messier, and nowhere near as compelling as the first season that got everyone to sit up and take notice of Levinson’s supposed “genius”.

There are three main plotlines at play this season, but they aren’t all as compelling as each other. The most interesting story, by far, is Rue’s. After falling off the wagon at the end of the first season, Rue (Zendaya) has dived deep into being a drug addict once more. She’s aided in this by a new compatriot, Elliot (Dominic Fike), another drug user who enjoys partying with Rue whenever she swings by his house. But Rue has kept her relapse into drug use a secret from everyone, including her friends, family, and Jules, and it’s inevitable that, at some point, everything she’s been doing will come out. It’s just a matter of time, and then the resulting train wreck will be hard to look away from.

The next plotline, as far as compelling narratives are concerned, focuses on Lexi Howard (Maude Apatow), Rue’s one-time best friend and the wallflower of their collective friend group. Lexi has struggled to find herself and fit in, but she finds a kindred spirit with Fez (Angus Cloud), the local drug dealer who’s somehow friends with everyone. The two strike a bond and grow closer, and this results in Lexi finding the inspiration to work on something special: a play about her own life. But there could be issues not only with the play, especially once Lexi’s older sister, Cassie (Sydney Sweeney), finds out about it. Plus, Fez’s vocation could lead to troubles for the two if they even tried to find a way to make something work.

And then there’s Cassie, who’s found herself tied up in a love triangle with Nate Jacobs (Jacob Elordi), the former (or maybe current) boyfriend of Cassie’s best friend, Maddy Perez (Alexa Demie). Nate and Cassie hook up at a New Year’s party while Nate and Maddy are on a break, but the stress of it all, especially when Nate keeps coming round, wears on Cassie. She has to keep the secret of the affair away from Maddy (since you don’t sleep with your best friend’s ex), and it’s inevitable that all of this will blow up in her face eventually.

Euphoria in its first season was an ensemble drama. It balanced all its characters and its storylines well and found ways to make each of its main characters compelling. The second season, though, has none of that balance. Rue’s storyline is the strongest, and the episodes that focus specifically on her – like the fifth episode of the season, "Stand Still Like the Hummingbird", which focuses on her hitting rock bottom after her drug addiction is revealed to everyone she knows – are the best of the season. Lexi’s storyline isn’t as vital to the season as a whole, but it does build to a two-part episode that uses her play as a framing device for the climactic events of the season, and there’s an artistic quality to this that I really liked.

But it’s with the other characters and storylines that the show really struggles. Cassie is locked in a boring storyline that drags not only herself but also Nate and Maddie down with her. There’s nothing interesting about a teen girl getting enmeshed in a love triangle, especially when everything she does, and all the events that transpire, feel so inevitable. And this says nothing about the characters that the show sidelines almost entirely, like Kat, the fifth member of the friend group, who has a storyline about how she has a boyfriend and she hates that and… well, that’s really it.

The kind part of me wants to say that Levinson wanted to try and keep all the characters in the season but failed to find compelling storylines for all of them. He struggled, stumbled a little, and came up short. However, it’s not hard to notice that while the meaty stories were given to the most compelling leads, Cassie’s storyline trudges on so that Levinson can use Sweeney to inject nudity in the show fairly regularly, all while Kat (who is the heaviest of the characters on the series) is sidelined almost entirely. Considering Levinson’s seeming proclivities (which were on full display in The Idol), it’s hard to simply go with the kind reading of this season. Why write compelling storylines for everyone when all you really want to see is tits and ass?

It’s tragic, really, because if the series could move the best storylines to the front – Rue, Jules, Lexi, and how they circle each other – while further pushing all the other cruft to the side or excising it entirely, then the season as a whole could have been better. Imagine a version of the series where Cassie’s love triangle storyline played out fully in the background, as whispers and hints, so that it could all come out at the debut of Lexi’s play. That would put more weight on the play storyline while also truly letting it feel like a climactic moment. The way it’s structured here, though, Cassie takes up more time in the season than Lexi with her nothing storyline that it’s hard to watch even at the best of times.

The parts of Euphoria I liked are some of the best material this season. But when the show stumbles it really stumbles, and those scenes and sequences are so hard to watch, so inconsequential to the stories that matter, that you have to wonder why they’re here. But Levinson thought himself a genius and he got to control every aspect of this production. With the high-highs came the lowest lows, and all it really reveals is that while Levinson can be an interesting and compelling creator, he really needs a team of people helping him hone and focus his vision. Otherwise you end up with a season like this, a messy and uneven sophomore outing that really could have been so much better.