Euphoria

But while the stage is set for more heartbreak and danger, you also sense that this show has grown up along with its ensemble.

A vapid show about vapidity, a materialist show about materialism: Euphoria owns its contradictions, and, in this final season, shows it’s mastered them.

After four years, Euphoria is back, as tawdry and titillating as ever. And yet also, somehow, better.

After watching the first three episodes of Euphoria Season 3, it’s unclear whether there’s hope for Rue and her friends, but there’s definitely a chance this polarizing HBO show might end its run on an incandescent high note.

Without the high school as the central location and a raging house party to kick things off, the premiere does have a fractured quality; by some miracle, the 62-minute runtime doesn’t drag.

Levinson also chooses shock value too often, leaning toward depravity in the third episode. Yet it’s easy enough to choose hope with so much visual excitement and star power on display — and, for us romantics, with Rue and Jules allowed to be in the same room again.

The show has, like its characters, grown up a lot. It’s a little sad that this has happened just in time for the show’s likely conclusion, but should this level of quality hold for the remaining episodes of the season, Euphoria might just go out on an, um, high note.

Euphoria’s third season is every bit as visually arresting and stomach-churning as the first two.

Euphoria is still bold, still daring, still lavish in its production. But it’s also still in search of a point to make. Its legacy after this final season depends on its ability to find one. 

“Euphoria” is never not entertaining. Over the years, Levinson has proven capable of crafting an engaging spectacle in his sleep. (Even “The Idol,” his disastrous collaboration with The Weeknd, demanded attention, if not approval.) There’s just a disjointedness to the various elements of Season 3 that this new incarnation of “Euphoria” has yet to overcome.

All storylines are not created equal and that’s perhaps even truer of this new season. For much of the time, only Rue’s story has any clear momentum, with Lexi stuck as a total afterthought and Maddy only slightly more relevant.

Is it beautifully shot? Yes. Does it feature excellent performances? Many. Does it have anything interesting to say? It doesn’t, really — in fact, it amounts to a whole lot of well-crafted, weakly-written nothing.

Season 3 of "Euphoria" is at its best as a pulpy, cartoonish approximation of the way early adulthood is an endless maze of coveting the seemingly enviable lives of your peers, unable to see through the strained charades they perform. .... But where the show used to seem too mature and provocative for a soap opera about teenagers, it now feels much too childish for a crime drama about adults. Time will tell if Levinson is able to strike a better balance with the remaining episodes, but from what we've seen so far, it doesn't feel particularly likely.

After four years, the edgy youth series that once shocked us into awareness now settles for covering old ground. Except for the undeniable Zendaya, the third and maybe final season is nothing to be euphoric about.

If you liked "Euphoria" then, you'll like it now. If you hated it then, you'll still hate it, but perhaps with less zeal. There is less passion and vibrancy to the show, even at its most objectionable moments.

Only time will tell if Levinson and company can turn what is essentially just the setup for the season into a payoff that feels deeper and more focused. Or if it will be content to reflect the uncertainty of its characters through storytelling that can feel maddeningly uncertain itself.

“Euphoria” always skewed nihilistic, so none of these ideas are out of place in what may be its last season. But Levinson’s series was never this spiritually hollow.

Euphoria, as always, is at its best when it remembers that Zendaya is its universe. Capable as she is, though, she's not enough to save it from the fate that haunts all false provocateurs: irrelevance.

You’d think that these events would have prompted some serious introspection on the part of the characters, but as we revisit them in the first few episodes of Season 3, it’s clear everyone has reverted to their factory settings. The difference is that, as they fan out on separate quests, each storyline comes slathered in the tropes of its own familiar genre.

The performances are mostly good – and sometimes excellent, as in the cases of Zendaya, Sweeney and Akinnuoye-Agbaje. But Euphoria season three is grim TV that seems hellbent on rattling us for the sake of it.

More lazy nihilism masquerading as coming-of-age insight.

By the third episode of eight, even Rue can’t quite make you care about this sorry group of amoral ghouls, who seem to loathe themselves as much as each other.

Rue and our other core characters are the best part of an overwrought mess. If these episodes are any indication of what to expect from the rest of the season, we’re in for a pretty dull ride.

Moving from the pressure cooker of high school to the real world (insofar as anything in Euphoria could be dubbed "real") makes the heightened emotion the show deals in feel all the more hollow.

He has a stacked cast perfectly capable of taking these characters, battle scars and all, to the next level. But based on the three episodes of eight provided for review, it looks like he’s squandering the stars that aligned their busy schedules for this on repurposed old habits from the past.