Euphoria (HBO Max, SkyNow)
Few shows have stirred up as much controversy as Euphoria, the HBO drama that splashed teenage sex and drugs across the small screen and launched the careers of Zendaya, Jacob Elordi and Sydney Sweeney.
Was Sam Levinson’s show, which follows high school students navigating addiction, social media and their dark pasts, intended as a cautionary tale for teens?
Or was it just naked exploitation of characters who were essentially children?
An infamous locker-room scene from season one featured the penises – albeit prosthetic ones – of around 30 schoolboys, so make of that what you will.
But Euphoria is now back for a long-delayed third series and is in some ways quite different, having been off our screens since 2022.
Two crucial cast members – Angus Cloud, who starred as Fezco, and Eric Dane, as Cal Jacobs – have also passed away since the last season was broadcast.
In the meantime, Levinson busied himself with The Idol, a sleazy disaster of a show about a self-important man perving over a pop singer, leaving many doubting whether Euphoria would return at all.
Zendaya, Elordi and Sweeney are all bona fide film stars now and, contractual requirements aside, you can see why they might not want to play second fiddle to each other.
Sweeney put nearly £300million through the box office over Christmas with the psychological thriller The Housemaid, and Elordi and Zendaya both recently opened the buzzy movies Wuthering Heights and The Drama.
But however it’s been perceived in the past, Euphoria has always been a place for actors to take on challenging material. And that hasn’t changed here.
Zendaya is still superb as Rue, a lost soul who’s struggled with addiction since we first met her as a schoolgirl fresh out of rehab.
At the start of series three, set five years after the last episode, Rue is hauling drugs across the Mexican border.
A scene in which she swallows narcotic-filled balloons is retch-inducing, and while Rue handles it with a cool surface Zendaya acts it so we can feel the fear the character doesn’t want to show.
Other scenes felt less three-dimensional. Cassie (Sweeney) is now engaged to Nate (Elordi), and the pair live uneasily in garish suburban California.
He is struggling to make money in construction while she lounges at home, roping the housekeeper into filming her in a skimpy dog outfit as she laps at a water bowl, dreaming of men sending her money on OnlyFans.
The way the camera lingers over Cassie’s body suggests the show isn’t rooting for her happy ending.
Sweeney is very game with it all, but it’s an undeniably surprising position in which to find an actress who, just last year, was on the Oscar hunt with her boxer biopic Christy.
Still, at least Cassie isn’t a teenager any more and, in scenes like the one above, that makes a huge difference to how comfortable Euphoria is to watch.
This lot are all adults now, searching for life’s answers in a California that looks more like the hostile frontier of the Old West than a glistening dream factory.
Rue, amazingly, finds religion, and for Cassie it’s still all about men and money, whereas Nate just wants to build a better façade of success than his abusive dad, Cal (Eric Dane filmed his scenes before his death from motor neurone disease in February).
This series clearly has questions to ask about life and an A-list cast to help answer them, and for those of us in the audience well out of our teens, it all feels refreshingly consensual compared with what came before.
