CBC46%
What is Euphoria even about anymore? 38%
By CBC Arts0%
4/13/2026, 8:43:00 PM
Topics: Arts, Television Criticism
Keywords: Euphoria, Sam Levinson, Roxana Hadadi, Gwen Adora, Onlyfans, Sex Work, Addiction, Television
BS Summary: This article contains 28 faulty reasoning types, including Hasty Generalization, Appeal to Authority, and Biased Writer Voice, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 21.1% saturation with 197 hits. Analysis detected 1,759 faulty-reasoning hits from 935 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 44.2% and a BS Rank of 38% (12,819 of 20,452 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 62.70% of the article peer group.
Back in 2019, HBO's Euphoria made a name for itself as a show about addiction.
Be it to drugs, alcohol, sex or attention, creator Sam Levinson brought cheap thrills in an expensive looking package to the series.
But for its fans, the show itself has become a kind of addiction, for the drama both on- and off-screen.
Arriving four years after the season two finale, critics are mixed on the latest season, which ditches high school for the lows of the California desert.
Today on Commotion, host Elamin Abdelmahmoud chats with Vulture TV critic Roxana Hadadi and OnlyFans creator Gwen Adora about where season three of Euphoria veers off course and their reactions to it.
We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity.
For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.
WATCH | Today's episode on YouTube:
Roxana: I think, culturally, we love shows about teenagers.
I think we're just fascinated by that in general.
We love backlashing shows about teenagers.
I lived through the 90210 backlash; I lived through The O.C. backlash.
You put a teen show on a cable channel that allows sex and drug use and all these explicit things, it's going to blow up, right?
I think there was a lot of that with Euphoria.
I also think Sam Levinson — and we'll get into his narratives later as a creative force — was giving something on television that a lot of people had not seen before, in terms of framing, composition, lighting.
I think if you hadn't watched something like Mr.
Robot, you'd be like, “Oh my God, all these Dutch angles!”
Like, it just was different from what people had seen.
So there's this mix of our forever fascination with the adolescent experience, and the depths to which he was taking these characters through that, and how it looks, which at moments is colourful, beautiful [and] phenomenal.
Elamin: Yeah, there's something about the way that Sam Levinson sort of shoots a tragedy and really awful stuff that makes you [be] like, “Oh, I want to be closer to the shot.
I want to be as close as possible.”
Does that mean the shot is saying something?
I don't know.
The first episode came out yesterday, what was your reaction to that first episode?
Roxana: I think it goes back to what we were sort of saying before.
This show is narratively about addiction and adolescence.
Now it's about, sort of, young 20-something aimlessness.
Every so often, a creator of a show will send a letter explaining their intentions to critics, and Levinson's this year was about the death of Angus Cloud, who had played Fezco on this show, and the dangers of fentanyl and the whole season being shaped by the question AA [Alcoholics Anonymous] raises about forgiveness, and how are you forgiven.
How do you forgive yourself?
Those are all very lofty and beautiful things, and it's very difficult for me to reconcile them when in episode one, we have Rue [with] her stomach packed with drugs.
She has diarrhea in a colander, and then we see the colander used for pasta.
These moments are very “juvenile edgelord,” [and] I have trouble rationalizing those with this loftier, seemingly moral or ethical thing that Levinson thinks he's doing about fentanyl.
Without the confines of the high school, we're just going everywhere [and] we're doing everything, and I don't feel any real emotion driving it at all.
So it's this weird tension.
Elamin: Gwen, many of the characters in this season are turning to sex work.
Jules is working as a sugar baby for rich men.
Sydney Sweeney's character, Cassie, wants to start making OnlyFans content.
You're an OnlyFan's creator.
How do you feel about the portrayal of sex and sex work on the show?
Gwen: So in previous seasons, they have also turned to sex work, so it's not surprising to me that they are doubling down on this when they are now being depicted as adults.
And it's so interesting to see those conversations being depicted in media these days, because OnlyFans is still extremely new and we're not getting a ton of representation of what that looks like, no matter how accurate it is.
This is like, in the Euphoria universe, the first foray into that.
Obviously, like in previous seasons, Kat, a character, is doing online sex work, but it's a little a little bit different.
I feel like now we're entering into the OnlyFans influencer era, which has its whole whole myriad of different problems.
Roxana: The argument here is: Gen Z has nowhere to go and nothing to do but turn to sex work, and look at how foolish Cassie is making herself look.
There's a condescension there.
And again, I'm like, “Do you like these characters or do you hate these characters?”
It's very unclear to me, like on a macro level, what the show thinks it's doing.
And then [to] the larger point, Harmony Korine has been making this point for like 30 years; he made it with Spring Breakers.
He made this point that sex drives the American persona in a way that nothing else does.
So I'm just looking for a little more like meat on the bone than just “Have you seen Sydney Sweeney?
Do you wanna see her topless?”
You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.
Panel produced by Jane van Koeverden.
Speakers
3speakers80%attributed speech186writer words
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100%flagged-word coverageGwen Adora
125 attributed words17% of attributed speech91% writer coverage
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