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Euphoria tv show5/1/2023 It’s probably best summarized, as the writer Molly Lambert put it, as “just A24 Degrassi”. This is not to complain that Euphoria is ridiculous, because ridiculousness is part and parcel of the teen soap genre, of which this show, despite its HBO pedigree, is a part. Euphoria, like its floundering main character, has shirked the teen plot. It also feels like an admission of viewers’ fatigue with Rue’s addiction, which has drawn the season into near gang movie territory. “Unfortunately,” she adds, without apology, “I’m not it.” It’s a fascinating meta moment – Levinson explaining, via Rue, why he’s testing the limits of her likability the show itself acknowledging that it’s not really successful escapism, nor trying to be. Our country’s dark and fucked up and people just want to find hope. “Now, in all fairness, I did say from the beginning that I had no intention of staying clean. “As a beloved character that a lot of people are rooting for, I feel a certain responsibility to make good decisions,” she says to the camera, pointer in hand, miming a schoolteacher instructing on the ABCs of hiding a relapse from friends and family. Take, for instance, one of its signature fantasy sequences early in this season’s third episode, in which Rue delivers a monologue on her character’s wearying relapse with drug addiction, a downward spiral that has tested fans’ morale and provided one half of the season’s loose amalgamation of plot. Euphoria feels stuck – a stressful, self-conscious drag. Whereas the first season felt like submerging, high, in a warm bath of high-school memories shot through with glitter, dialed up to 11, and distorted in a funhouse mirror, the second season – self-indulgent, luridly violent, still lush, expensively soundtracked – has taken on the feeling of a chore. The chasm between real high school (boring) and Euphoria high school (increasingly unhinged) has become distractingly vast, a joke turned into its own TikTok meme on its peacocking fashion. Online reactions toggle chaotically between sincere enjoyment and hate-watching or, for many, something inarticulably in between. The ratings are up – 10.3 million people have watched the season premiere, and this week’s episode was up 41% from the week before – but reception is mixed. The long-anticipated second season, which premiered in January and opened with a brash, 10-minute, Scorsese-style sequence on drug dealer Fezco’s (Angus Cloud) gun-toting criminal grandmother (played by The Sopranos’ Kathrine Narducci), has leaned even more to that excess, to a divisive degree.
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