Euphoria season 2 has a big problem it needs to fix
Euphoria season two spoilers follow.
After a year-long wait, Euphoria is finally back on our screens. Sam Levinson’s critically-acclaimed baby was championed back in 2019 for its marriage of technical mastery with its intimately honest focus on high-school life told through a myriad of different perspectives.
Its unflinching commitment to provocation drew both praise and criticism, but like it or loathe it, it is impossible to say that Euphoria pulls any punches. However, now two episodes into this newest season, something feels… off.
Its sucker punch nature is still very much there, that's for sure, and the show's extraordinary aesthetic is taken to new levels across both episodes; the problem is, season two doesn't quite seem to know the story it wants to tell.
Euphoria feels like it's lost focus. In season one, each episode felt anchored to a central character – Stuntin’'Like My Daddy had Nate, '03 Bonnie and Clyde had Maddy – we learned about their idiosyncrasies, developing their individual journeys while naturally tying them to the overarching narrative of the season.
In season two, we're teased with the gift of a Fez-dedicated episode only to quickly flick through his life like a scrapbook to get to the funfair-like framing of the party. From there, we bounce all over space and time, never settling on a specific character's journey, emotions or feelings.
This lack of focus becomes even more apparent in episode two as we check in with nearly every single character on the show, despite a lack of development for most bar Fez and Lexi, as well as Cal and Nate. It's as if Levinson is afraid to leave us alone with them, forcing them together like Kat's sabotage of her and Ethan’s bowling date to include Maddy and Jules.
Ironically, the one attribute Levinson does seem focused on is shocking his audience. In season one, these moments are often tied inextricably to both the development of its central narrative and the audience's understanding of its characters.
The montage of Nate's father Cal's sexual escapades not only inform us about the complicated (to say the least) relationship between Nate and his father, but also set the triangle of Nate, Maddy, and Jules in motion. Kat's animated One Direction fan fiction segment informs who she is at an intimate level against who she's attempting to be. These moments are shocking but integral.
Season two's moments feel disconnected from anything other than a "gotcha!" moment of excess. Fez's beatdown of Nate is surprisingly brutal even by Euphoria's standards, but then it's resolved almost immediately, Kat's muscular Viking warrior murdering Ethan is one of the multiple times this episode emphasises their relationship problems, and Nate's Cassie-as-mother fantasy comes entirely out of the left-field (given Cassie's entire pregnancy plot, shouldn’t she be the one with this fantasy?).
While it's more than satisfying to see Nate get the pummelling he deserves, it doesn't appear to have had any lasting impact, which is the same for most of season two's moments like this. These feel like fan-scripted "what ifs" rather than the impactful, informative scenes we glimpsed in season one.
Euphoria is depending on its style to make up for its lack of substance. The cinematography and blocking of season two's premiere episode are incredible, to be sure, but it feels like an aesthetic masquerade for a weak script.
Jules and Rue's reunion and reconnection felt far too rushed, all too easily brushing off the emotional complexity and unexpectedly intimate special portraits of the pair. Likewise, Nate and Cassie's relationship feels like a forced development that arises from a lack of understanding of how to continue Nate's story, despite the wealth of psychological trauma witnessed in season one's finale.
Even Ethan and Kat's relationship problems feel too contrived; for lack of a better plan, Sam Levinson has thrown in conflict for conflict's sake. It doesn't feel authentic, and authenticity is the compelling backbone of this hyper-stylized, hallucinatory high-school drama.
Because of this lack of focus, not to mention the dependency on stylistic shock, half of Out of Touch feels like the penultimate episode narratively, due to the lack of a clear central plot overarching these individual adventures.
Meanwhile, the other half is an over-reliance on Euphoria's dream-like aesthetic to distract from sub-par writing. Sam Levinson had a whole year to consider how to develop these relationships – so why does it feel like he spent all that time brainstorming how to create viral tweet-able moments instead?
One solution to re-focus Euphoria's emotional authenticity may be to invite the actors themselves to participate in the storytelling experience.
It worked incredibly well for Fuck Anyone Who's Not a Sea Blob, with part of its unique nature stemming from Hunter Schafer's co-writing credit, including the heavy influence of a poem she wrote upon leaving high school. While it still incorporates that hyper-stylization, alongside a shock or two (as always), everything is in service of reflecting the emotional psychology of both Hunter-as-actress and Jules-as-character.
There's raw honesty and vulnerability that individuals like Levinson could arguably never express; as Schafer herself commented (via NME), "It was genuinely the most cathartic artist experience I've ever had". Simply inviting more perspectives is never a bad thing, especially for a show like Euphoria that includes many radically different viewpoints across gender, sexuality and socio-economic status.
We're only two episodes in, so it's entirely possible that Euphoria may course-correct itself and find that compelling focus it first hooked audiences with. If not, this show risks undermining the critical acclaim it once received and HBO could easily find themselves with a one-hit-wonder. The hyper-stylish gloss isn't enough to keep people – we need that raw, intimate focus or else we're switching off.
Euphoria airs Sunday nights on HBO and Monday nights on NOW and Sky Atlantic in the UK.
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