Our hot takes on "Euphoria" 's final season The final verdict on the year’s most controversial show

The third season of Euphoria ended just over a week ago, and we wanted to take some time to process it. Not out of the pain of seeing the long-drawn-out work of creator and director Sam Levinson come to an end, but not to digest it either, as if it had been the heaviest family lunch we had ever attended. It is more a matter of reworking what the series was and what it has become, reading and engaging with all the pros and cons that have been said and written about it. Because it is this division that will remain the most from the third season of the show, split between those who hated it and those who loved it.

There is also the possibility of finding oneself somewhere in the middle, as in this case: not feeling the contempt and denigration with which people so often enjoy destroying a product, but not being so enchanted by it as to invalidate its issues when they appear so forcefully before our eyes. The merit of the third season, then, was certainly its ability to get people talking, especially after a period in which the show seemed like something so far in the past, so tied to a time gone by compared to the present, that it no longer had value, relevance, or even public interest - quite the opposite of what it proved.

To this must be added its ability to create engagement among the audience, which, however, is not always due to a genuine attachment to the characters’ storylines, but rather to being part of the shared conversation, the post-viewing dialogue. A degree of entertainment that is nevertheless evident, and in some way worthy of recognition, even if for those who are not immediately intrigued it can fade because of the drawn-out timing and narratives of the stories, with episodes seemingly unable to last less than an hour. Yet it is undeniable that it pushes us to want to know what happens next and what will become of the improbable lives of these protagonists, who are at once on the attack and adrift, riding the crest of the wave and heading toward its inevitable depths.

This connects to the most criticizable aspect of Euphoria, one that many have criticized and that can be criticized in relation to the previous two seasons as well, but which is impossible not to acknowledge even while enjoying the viewing experience: the morbid, aestheticized, and exaggerated accumulation of the few themes around which it builds its identity. We do not want to break the aura of tragedy and solemnity that the third season wanted to create around itself, but it is impossible not to think that the percentage of distress emerging from the high school attended by the protagonists is above average for the American suburban area in which the show takes place.

It also makes one wonder what all those classmates think, the ones who, after all, knew these boys and girls who have become men and women, and who apparently only had the options of taking drugs, dealing drugs, working in Hollywood, or entering the world of sex work. Or who knows, perhaps the ones we saw were the only bad apples, and all the others became consultants, lawyers, executives, doctors. Or, quite simply, just decent people.

We know that exaggeration has always been Euphoria’s defining trait, but ever since it moved beyond adolescence and the places initially inhabited by its protagonists, it feels as though the show wanted to push itself to the extreme in order to reach a kind of sublimation which, however, is hard not to read also as an obsession with a form of dramatization that could at least brush against camp, but misses it. Where the themes become predictable: sex, religion, cowboys, surgery, debt, money, the Bible - all variations of the same perversion that remains an end in itself, even indulging in itself, thinking that shooting on film elevates the project, when it is only further proof of playing with fire when it comes to the line between good and bad taste.

And it is exactly along this strip that Euphoria 3 takes shape, where good meets evil, where excess meets the need for calm, where fucking would like to turn into embraces, and where everything becomes a repetition of a repetition, a stretching things out to the point of exhaustion, a moving back and forth because, in reality, it no longer knows where to stop. Where redemption is not contemplated; on the contrary, it was driven out with the third season, erasing the narrative arcs of the previous ones - probably its greatest mistake. At most, one can rely on the workings of fate, whose ending should this time be definitive.