Warning: This piece discusses the third season of Euphoria, which will include spoilers for the final episode and hell, probably the whole show. If you haven’t watched it and care about that, there’s your warning.
Euphoria ended its run on May 31, 2026 the only way it ever really knew how: lotta loud booms and blasts followed by bizarrely profound (or attempts at it) moments of silence. Focusing the finale on Colman Domingo’s Ali may have been one of the few decisions this third season got right. We naturally like Ali and he’s basically the only character at this point who isn’t down in the muck. I mean, sure, we saw younger Ali smoking crack and ruining his family life. We also saw what Ali has done to atone and to place in the minds of other addicts that life never has to be just your addictions. Ali is figuratively (and thuddingly literally) the conscience of Euphoria. He is the means that even when the show is in said muck, you assume if he’s back in the picture, maybe there is a smidgen of hope. So of course he actually has to play the role of the reaper, the one who sees how advice can’t always beat actual addiction or even just smite.
I haven’t yet brought up the actual arc of season three, a seemingly endless drug war between rote strip club aficionado Alamo Brown and the familiar monotone husk of the ex-school teacher Laurie (to her credit played expertly by Martha Kelly, who like a lot of the cast of the show really mostly is great at expressing less than great motivations and ideas). The reason is pretty simple, it’s mostly a waste of time. Alamo didn’t need to be the constant figure he is or the guy with a weird mom or whatever to get to where we end up (Ali blowing him away). Laurie didn’t really need to be so broken that neo-Nazis run her increasingly unstable empire. Cassie didn’t need to be in a warped version of sex work that entirely feels written by a guy who watches porn and not the people who actually perform that work. Nate probably didn’t need to die, definitely didn’t need to throw the hard f-slur to get there. And so on and so forth (Lexi going from normie to bizarrely puritanical soap writer, Rue getting into any of this stuff in general, Jules showing up to admittedly look beautiful and basically nothing else). One can only come up with a simple conclusion to all of this.
Maybe Sam Levinson is a very stupid guy.
Ok, maybe that's a little unfair. Making TV shows has to be difficult. Making a season of television where nearly all of the principal cast has some sort of prior commitment or level of fame or Elvis Heathcliff to do sounds impossible. Especially when you need like half of them to either die or otherwise get away from everyone else. Suddenly Maude Apatow has to make Lexi Howard a far more annoying person who barely tolerates her work or her family and never talks to her mom. Suddenly Cassie Howard is a comical sex worker whose version of sex work can easily be critiqued by it being written by a guy who likes porn and not by the people who perform it. Suddenly Jules, while just as flawed in many respects as her fellow teens, goes from being a reasonably empathetic portrayal of a trans woman to literally just idly painting after her true first love dies. Suddenly, actually, they did get Maddy right. Very easy to imagine her as the influencer’s influencer. But regardless, most of these turns just kinda make no sense and ultimately that’s the endgame of Euphoria, a show that has always claimed to be about addiction, but sure seems like it wanted to be a different kind of depravity before it got to its ultimate punch.
And so we should go back to the last 20 minutes, where Colman Domingo’s Ali finally gets revenge for Alamo Brown’s fentanyl laced murder bottle where yeah, he blows away Alamo, a little after blowing away Marshawn Lynch’s G with a shotgun shell to the ole jubblies. After that, he finds the homestead/plantation (house in the middle of a field, whatever you want to call it) that took in Rue briefly in the season 3 premiere. This seems like a silly idea at its core that he’ll just break bread with this random lily white Christian family or hell, that a show this purposefully incendiary would even go “you know, this Bible book also has a lot of sex and violence! Isn’t that crazy?” Hell, I don’t really fully get how Ali denounces his own name and his belief in Islam in the first place. I do get how this seems like MAGA propaganda. But I also know that hidden kind of Christianity, the mockingly dubbed hippie Christianity. And while I think Sam Levinson is an idiot about this and it’s patently ridiculous to read anything about this ending as a happy one, American flag flying on a homestead and all, it does feel like a hippie Christianity. A belief that ultimately you have to find who matters and not necessarily that you change to fit their ways and systems, but that you truly can’t go it alone. After all, that’s where the most cynical of minds can go when left that way.
Ultimately, Euphoria is a flawed product. One that has highs that are deeply incredible (If you haven’t watched either of the 2020 specials done between season 1 and 2, please give them a watch just for how Colman and Zendaya beautifully handle what is mainly an hour long two-hander) and lows that HBO genuinely might not fall to ever again, even when HBO becomes the home for the 45th show in the Sheridanverse. Yet sometimes, even flawed products have qualities that you’ll just never see again in a show. You sure won’t see them in another Sam Levinson work, especially as it’s fairly telling how Zendaya can lift scenes that say Abel Tesfaye cannot. You won’t see someone pull the purse-strings of daddy HBO so hard that they spend this damn much on a show shot on filmstock that looks crisp unless I guess they give Paul Thomas Anderson the One Battle After Another spinoff series Hark, The Christmas Adventurers Club. And it sure seems like you won’t see another HBO show this enraptured in its monoculture, for better or worse.
