Euphoria as it existed in that first season was full of bodies in close proximity, doing things together that simply aren’t safe in this impossible moment. The show has been gone so long in part because of Covid, but Levinson was able to produce a pair of special episodes meant to bridge the gap between seasons until fuller production resumes. Still, the show’s rare quiet moments were so powerful, they couldn’t help prompt the question of how good the series as a whole could be if it ever switched to decaf for a while. (HBO Max, like most streamers, has a “skip intro” option a “skip Nate” option would improve Euphoria by about 40 percent.) The performances - by not only Zendaya, but Hunter Schafer, Sydney Sweeney, Barbie Ferreira, and many more - were so strong, and the cinematography so stunning (even if it occasionally called too much attention to itself), that much more of Euphoria worked than didn’t. Other parts felt unintentionally comical, particularly football star Nate (Jacob Elordi) being presented as a supervillain, able to intimidate everyone into bending to his indomitable sociopathic will, no matter the personal cost to themselves. Some of this was fantastic, particularly anything involving Rue herself, with Zendaya eventually winning a well-deserved Emmy for grounding every one of Levinson’s flights of fancy with absolute, unflinching conviction. It wasn’t just that Rue and her classmates were engaging in reckless behavior with abandon, but that creator, writer, and chief director Sam Levinson tried to make every scene, and eventually every shot, pop off the screen. Euphoria Season One feels like a million years ago (the finale aired in August of 2019), but Rue’s song-and-dance fantasy wasn’t out of character for a series that was so aggressively, proudly up in its audience’s grill in every moment of every scene.
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