And we cannot talk about Euphoria without talking about Labrinth’s music. He added soul to Euphoria’s characters. It was the show’s pulse. Whether it was his song ‘Formula’ or the amazing ‘All of Us’ or ‘Forever’ among the many amazing picks, his soundtracks elevated the scenes into something almost spiritual. The third season brings in the brilliant Hans Zimmer, but he doesn’t bring in the ‘sound’ that made Euphoria “Euphoria”. It created a new musical identity for the show, departing from the electronic-pop and R&B soul style Labrinth used in the previous seasons. With the sonic backbone also gone, the show’s rhythm feels lost, literally.
The characters who once carried moral ambiguity and emotional density now feel like flat archetypes of the people they once were. Cassie, once a study in longing, insecurity, and male validation, is now looking like a cardboard cutout trying too hard to reflect male fantasy. Levinson has made her a wannabe OnlyFans model who dresses up as a dog and a baby. It’s almost like the creator told AI to write a character based on Instagram trad wives. Nate’s psychological complexity and his obsession from earlier seasons are also diluted. Jules is now a sugar baby. And the Rue, the fragile axis of the show, once showing the ugly reality of teenage addiction, feels like a narrative placeholder.
So, you take away the aesthetic, the music, the characters’ essence, and what you’re left with is an overstuffed mess with no soul. It is provocative for the sake of it, far detached from the emotional core that once grounded it.
There’s a shift in how sexuality is portrayed in the show. In the previous seasons, it was not used for shock value as much. It was uncomfortable but purposeful, used to interrogate power, and was tethered to self-worth. Now it feels less meaningful, simply feeding into fetishes. This is quite evident with Sweeney’s character, Cassie, roleplaying as a baby at a time when the world is freshly disgusted by the revelations of the Epstein files.
In many ways, Euphoria now risks being the very thing it critiqued, a spectacle without introspection. Like when satire becomes reality. And that’s where comparisons to The Idol (2023), also helmed by Levinson, start to make sense. Often dubbed as ‘torture porn’, that show, too, was criticised for leaning heavily into sexualisation while lacking emotional depth or narrative cohesion.
The real tragedy, however, isn’t that Euphoria has changed. We all know characters grow and transform, and so does the tonality of every show. It’s just that it has forgotten what it set out to do. Euphoria was about the teenage experience, when you feel the emotional weight with scathing intensity. It made you feel it too. And maybe that’s why audiences are . They are grieving the death of true artistic perversion.
It is the classic creative pitfall. Creators forget that substance precedes style. And when even that is lost, we’re left with the glossy carcass of a show that had all the potential and now just a lot of ‘what ifs’.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)
