EUPHORIA: Inside the Show That Rewired How We Talk About Being Young

There are television shows that entertain you, and then there are television shows that feel like someone reached into the most uncomfortable corner of your memory and pulled something out that you had never quite found the words for. HBO’s Euphoria belongs firmly in the second category. Since its debut in 2019, the series has generated conversation that extends far beyond typical TV discourse — it has sparked genuine cultural reckoning about addiction, identity, mental health, trauma, and the impossible pressure of growing up inside a world that is simultaneously hyper-connected and profoundly isolating.

This post is a deep dive into what Euphoria is, why it resonates so powerfully, what the critics and the defenders are each getting right, and why the show remains one of the most important pieces of pop culture produced in the last decade.

What Is Euphoria, Really?

On the surface, Euphoria is a drama series created by Sam Levinson, based on an Israeli series of the same name. It follows Rue Bennett, played with devastating precision by Zendaya, a seventeen-year-old who returns from rehab without any real intention of staying sober. Around her orbits a constellation of characters — Jules, a transgender girl navigating love and her own complicated sense of self; Nate, a football player whose toxic masculinity masks layers of deep psychological damage; Cassie, whose desperate need for validation pulls her into self-destructive patterns; Maddy, fiercely loyal and sharp-tongued; Kat, reclaiming her body and identity through the internet; and Fezco, the drug dealer who ends up being one of the most morally grounded people in the entire show.

But the surface description doesn’t capture what the show actually does to you when you watch it. Euphoria operates less like a traditional narrative and more like a fever dream with a conscience. Its visual language — the glitter, the extreme close-ups, the kaleidoscopic cinematography by Marcell Rév — is not just stylistic indulgence. It mirrors the interior experience of teenagers who are performing their lives in real time, who have grown up understanding themselves partly through how they appear on a screen, and who are navigating emotion with no roadmap and very few reliable adults nearby.

The Zendaya Effect

It would be almost impossible to discuss Euphoria without spending real time on Zendaya’s performance as Rue. Having transitioned from Disney Channel into more serious work, Zendaya’s casting initially drew skepticism from people who couldn’t see past her earlier career. That skepticism evaporated quickly.

Her portrayal of Rue is one of the most physically and emotionally committed performances in recent television history. She plays the hunger of addiction — not just the craving for a substance, but the craving for relief from the exhausting work of being alive — with a specificity that feels researched, felt, and somehow both simultaneously. The Season 2 argument scene between Rue and her mother, which runs for several unbroken minutes without cutting away, became one of the most discussed single scenes in HBO’s modern catalog.

Zendaya won back-to-back Emmy Awards for the role, becoming both the youngest winner and then the first person to win twice for the same drama role. Those awards feel like formal acknowledgment of something audiences already understood: this is a generational performance.

The Controversy, Taken Seriously

No discussion of Euphoria would be honest without addressing the significant criticism the show has faced, because some of it deserves genuine engagement rather than dismissal.

The most consistent critique is that the show aestheticizes the very things it claims to critique. When drug use is filmed with gorgeous slow motion and a perfectly curated soundtrack, does that glamorize it, even inadvertently? When teen sexuality is depicted with explicit detail, does the artistic framing actually protect viewers, or does it create a different kind of harm?

These are not bad-faith questions. The producer of the original Israeli series, Ron Leshem, publicly expressed concern about the American adaptation’s approach, suggesting that the visual style risked making dangerous behavior look appealing to young viewers. Several addiction counselors and parents have echoed this, arguing that the show’s aesthetics function as a kind of recruitment poster regardless of the narrative consequences that follow.

The counterargument — made by Levinson, by Zendaya, and by many viewers who have lived through experiences the show depicts — is that sanitizing these realities would be its own form of dishonesty, and arguably a more dangerous one. The argument goes that teenagers are not protected by not seeing themselves on screen. What actually harms them is the cultural silence that surrounds addiction, sexual trauma, and mental illness, a silence that tells them their experiences are too shameful or too extreme to be named. Euphoria, in this reading, is a form of witness.

Both sides have a point, and the tension between them is probably unresolvable, which is part of what makes the show worth arguing about.

The Special Episodes and What They Changed

Between Seasons 1 and 2, HBO released two special bridge episodes filmed under COVID-19 restrictions with minimal cast, stripped-down production, and an intimate chamber-drama format that felt entirely unlike the main series. The first, “Trouble Don’t Last Always,” follows Rue and her sponsor Ali — played by Colman Domingo in one of the best supporting performances the show has produced — in a diner on Christmas Day.

The episode is nearly forty minutes of two people talking. No glitter. No music video sequences. No kaleidoscope cinematography. Just conversation, grief, and two people trying to figure out whether hope is still a rational position to hold.

It may be the best episode the show has ever made.

What those special episodes revealed was that Sam Levinson is capable of enormous restraint when the story demands it, and that the maximalism of the main series is a deliberate choice rather than a creative limitation. They also reframed the entire project. Whatever the show is doing visually, its core is about whether Rue survives — not just physically, but in the sense of finding a reason to stay present in her own life. Colman Domingo’s Ali, with his own history of addiction and his complicated faith, became the show’s moral anchor in a way that no other character had managed.

The Music, the Fashion, and the Cultural Footprint

Euphoria has had an influence on youth culture that extends well beyond the show itself. The makeup aesthetic — heavy glitter, graphic liner, bold theatrical looks — became a dominant style referenced across beauty media, fashion editorials, and social platforms almost immediately after Season 1 aired. The term “Euphoria makeup” has a clear cultural meaning now that didn’t exist before 2019.

The original score and soundtrack, supervised by Labrinth and featuring his original compositions, created an entirely distinct sonic identity. Labrinth’s theme for Rue — built around a gospel-influenced melody that keeps threatening to break open into something larger — became one of the most recognizable pieces of television music of the decade. Billie Eilish, Lana Del Rey, and a range of alternative and hip-hop artists have all had their work recontextualized by appearing in the show, sometimes turning relatively obscure tracks into streaming phenomena overnight.

The costume design by Heidi Bivens deserves its own conversation. Every character’s wardrobe functions as psychological shorthand. Maddy’s outfits signal confidence and danger. Cassie’s shift from girl-next-door pastels to Maddy-imitating styles becomes a visual record of her psychological unraveling across Season 2. Rue’s hoodies and sweats are not laziness but armor. Fashion critics have published long-form analyses of what characters are wearing in the same way they might discuss a film by a major auteur, which is unusual for a television drama and says something about the level of intentionality behind the work.

The Characters Who Don’t Get Enough Credit

Fezco — Fez — is the character that consistently surprises viewers who come to the show expecting him to be a minor antagonist. Angus Cloud’s performance, rooted in genuine warmth and a kind of unhurried presence, turned a character who could have been a plot device into one of the show’s most beloved figures. The Season 2 premiere, which opens with an extended backstory of Fez’s childhood and how he came to be who he is, is one of the show’s most ambitious creative swings.

The grief that followed Angus Cloud’s death in 2023 — he passed away at twenty-five, after the losses within his own family — was enormous and sincere, and it said something real about how deeply audiences had connected with his work. The question of how the show will handle his absence, should it continue, remains genuinely painful.

Ali — Colman Domingo’s character — deserves recognition as the only adult in the show who functions as a credible moral presence. The adults in Euphoria are generally portrayed as either absent, overwhelmed, or complicit in various ways. Ali is different. He has no illusions about Rue, no sentimental attachment to the idea of her getting better, and no patience for self-pity — his own or hers. His sobriety is not a resolution but an ongoing practice, and the show is honest about what it has cost him. Domingo won his own Emmy for the role, a recognition that was long overdue.

Season 2 and the Polarization

Season 2 arrived in January 2022 and divided viewers in ways that Season 1 had not. The spectacle intensified. The narrative became more fragmented. The Cassie and Nate storyline, which became the season’s dominant dramatic thread, struck some viewers as compelling and others as repetitive. Sam Levinson came under increased criticism, including reports from crew members about on-set conditions and rewrites, which added an uncomfortable layer to the critical conversation.

And yet the season also produced some of the most extraordinary individual sequences in the show’s run — the New Year’s Eve party, the Lexi play, the final extended sequence of Rue choosing her own life. Zendaya’s work in Season 2 was, if anything, more demanding and more impressive than in Season 1.

The polarization around Season 2 is partly a product of the show’s success. When a cultural object becomes large enough, it attracts investment from people who want to claim it and defend it, but also from people who want to tear it down as a form of status signaling in the opposite direction. The truth of the show sits somewhere beneath all of that noise.

What Euphoria Gets Fundamentally Right

The deepest thing Euphoria understands — the thing that makes it more than an aesthetically ambitious drama — is the relationship between pain and performance. Its characters are not simply hurting. They are hurting while simultaneously presenting curated versions of themselves, managing the perception of their pain even as they are overwhelmed by it. This is not unique to teenagers, but it is especially acute for a generation that grew up learning to document their lives and to understand themselves through the feedback of others.

Rue’s voiceover narration, which frames the show from an unknown point in the future, is the formal expression of this. She is telling us her story — which means she is shaping it, selecting what to include, deciding what it means. The unreliability implied in that structure is not a trick. It is the most honest thing about the show.

The show also gets something right about the texture of care. The people who love Rue — Jules, Fez, Ali, her mother, her sister — are not saved from hurting her by their love. Love and damage coexist throughout, which is a more accurate picture of how people actually function than the clean distinction between those who care and those who cause harm.

The Future of Euphoria

As of this writing, the future of Euphoria remains in some uncertainty. Zendaya’s film career has reached a level of mainstream success — Dune, Challengers — that makes the scheduling demands of a television production increasingly complex. The grief surrounding Angus Cloud’s death adds another layer of difficulty to how the story continues. HBO has confirmed that the series will return, but concrete details remain elusive.

What seems clear is that Euphoria has already accomplished something durable. It exists now as a reference point — for how addiction can be dramatized, for what television can look like when it takes visual style seriously as a form of meaning-making, for how a performance can define a generation. Future shows about young people will navigate toward it or away from it, but they will not be able to ignore it.

A Final Thought

What Euphoria does, at its best, is make loneliness legible. Not cute or romantic or redeemable loneliness, but the specific kind that comes from being surrounded by people and still feeling fundamentally untranslatable. That experience is not exclusive to teenagers, but it is perhaps most acute and most dangerous when you are seventeen and have not yet discovered that it does not necessarily last forever.

If the show reaches even some of those viewers — the ones for whom Rue’s experience is not entertainment but recognition — then whatever its flaws, it has done something worth doing. And that might be the most important thing to say about it.