![]() ![]() Levinson is far better at crafting material to showcase the rest of his impressive young ensemble. That’s much less a knock on Jacob Elordi than on the writing. (*) Though even that has the downside of arriving after Showtime’s frequently Nineties-set Yellowjackets has usurped Euphoria ‘s crown as the It Show about teenage girls behaving recklessly. And it plays as unintentionally silly whenever the show attempts to humanize him in spite of all the evil things he continues to do. Some of the characters trapped in his orbit become fully realized despite him - one episode offers an extended flashback to the high school days of Nate’s closeted father, Cal (Eric Dane), which feels like what the mid-Nineties version of Euphoria would have been(*) - but Nate himself is such a caricatured assembly of clichés that it becomes hard to take any scene with him seriously. ![]() He just doesn’t seem interested in it - certainly not as much as he is in the never-ending chicanery of Nate, a sociopath capable of talking anyone into doing whatever monstrous thing he wants, no matter how much it may be against their self-interest. Levinson’s capable of making that ever-so-slightly comic and relaxed version of the show whenever he wants to. 'Euphoria' Probably Won't Be Back Until 2025 (Nor, for that matter, does it help that the show can sometimes be fuzzy about when events in one story are happening relative to events in another, and occasionally about distinguishing reality from fantasy from flashbacks.) No one has substantially aged onscreen other than maybe Storm Reid as Rue’s younger sister Gia, but it’s not always easy to remember what happened to these characters two and a half years ago, and what developments may be informing their behavior here. So barely any time has passed for the kids, despite how long it’s been for us. ![]() (*) The Season One finale took place circa the school’s winter formal, and the Rue and Jules specials were both set shortly afterwards on Christmas Eve. Things do not get calmer as the season moves along. We’re flung into a wild New Year’s Eve party(*) in which one character gets savagely beaten, another has a urine-soaked washcloth thrown in their face, and another briefly goes into cardiac arrest. Euphoria: Same as it ever was! That extremely caffeinated style extends to our reintroduction to the rest of the ensemble: supervillain jock Nate (Jacob Elordi), queen bee Maddy (Alexa Demie), opposite sisters Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) and Lexi (Maude Apatow), occasional cam girl Kat (Barbie Ferreira), plus new kid Elliot (Dominic Fike). Sometimes, the same scene can conjure both reactions at once.Īny illusions of that fizzle, though, within the opening minutes of tonight’s Season Two premiere, which feature a woman - Kitty (Katherine Narducci), the grandmother of the series’ affable young drug dealer Fezco (Angus Cloud) - marching into a strip club, interrupting a man mid-blow job, and shooting him in the leg while we see blood spray onto his erect penis. Then others are so exasperating and self-indulgent that they can leave you questioning whether you liked the better parts at all. The new episodes offer scenes that are so insightful or artfully presented that Euphoria can feel in that moment like one of the very best shows television has produced in a while. Those extreme reactions hold true to Euphoria itself, which is returning for a second full season after being mostly absent for the last two and a half years due to the Covid-19 pandemic. After the twisted contest has concluded, the camera pans to her dresser, where her phone displays a text from a friend who’s apoplectic over the way her boyfriend just spoke to her.Īmong the things that Euphoria best captures is the sense that in adolescence, everything that happens to you, no matter how major or minor, can carry the same hyperbolic weight - that anything positive somehow feels like a trip to paradise, and anything negative is an armageddon. In an upcoming episode of the HBO high-school drama Euphoria, one of the show’s characters is confronted by an armed intruder in her bedroom and forced to participate in a game of Russian Roulette.
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