“It’s cowboys and Indians, civilised man against the savage,” snarls a gun-toting kingpin in the third and final series of HBO Max’s Euphoria. As the strains of the score begin to twang – like the music of Ennio Morricone shimmering over America’s southwest – it becomes clear that Sam Levinson’s groundbreaking show, back after a four-year hiatus, is now a western. The western is, after all, the most American of all genres, and Euphoria, set in a tortured frontier, amid the gold rush of the attention economy, is a clear-eyed, unflattering portrait of modern America: the good, the bad, and the ugly.
A lot has happened since high school. Rue (Zendaya) has become a drug mule, doing deadly runs across the Mexican border, until a new but equally lethal opportunity presents itself. Nate (Jacob Elordi) and Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) are engaged, living away from East Highland, each grasping for something more than their domestic seclusion. Maddy (Alexa Demie) is working as a talent management assistant, her acrylic nails clacking incessantly against the screen of her phone, while Jules (Hunter Schafer) has drifted out of art school and is now living as a sugar baby in a Los Angeles penthouse. Superficially, they are all doing OK. “I’m California sober,” Rue confesses, with a wry chuckle. “I avoid things that could destroy my life.” And yet Euphoria has always been a show about self-destruction, and the one thing these characters can’t avoid is themselves.
