If certain corners of the internet are to be believed, last Tuesday night, Zendaya arrived fashionably late to the Los Angeles premiere of her salacious HBO series Euphoria. She posed for photographers, briefly hugged the show’s creator, Sam Levinson, with the strained affection of a child being asked to embrace their cousin who smells, then leapt into a waiting car headed to parts unknown. But in fact, Zendaya didn’t speed off as rapidly as possible from the scene of the crime (or, as it’s also known, the third season of TV’s most depleting exercise in pop-video nihilism). Instead, she giddily chatted with her castmates, then took her seat at the TCL Chinese Theatre to watch her character guzzle down bags of fentanyl. Perhaps things in Euphoria-ville weren’t quite as bad as some had imagined?
That said, it might not matter much. Since it debuted in the summer of 2019 – its 26 episodes have stretched across a pandemic, multiple international wars and two Trump presidencies – Euphoria has become just as famous for its fictional stories of addiction and all-American depravity as it has its behind-the-scenes drama, whether it’s accurately reported or entirely made up by gossips and TikTok teens. Are Zendaya and her co-star Sydney Sweeney feuding? Is Euphoria luridly exploiting its young cast? Is Levinson purely bad vibes or just woefully misunderstood? Season three – reportedly the show’s last – has now arrived amid a deluge of questions like this, with answers not exactly forthcoming. And with so much angst and fury flowing through its bloodstream, it’ll be a bit of a relief when it finally concludes.
