Euphoria: Is Hollywood Having a Come to Jesus Moment?

June 2026

 

The final season of Euphoria should be titled...

 

“The Desperate Housewives Edition of Only Fans”...

 

Because apparently if you are a comely young woman...

With money problems....

 

Like Margo in Margo’s Got Money Problems...

Softcore porn is your ticket...

 

Or at least that seems to be the zeitgeist this year...

 

Now Euphoria is a far more complicated story than....

Margo not being able to afford child care...

Or Sidney Sweeney as Cassie exposing her considerable assets to pay the bills...

 

Because initially this series was about Rue’s drug addiction...

And the sex lives of high schoolers...

 

Who are now dressing like they raided a Frederick’s of Hollywood warehouse in Fontana...

And are wearing makeup most often seen on hookers... or drag queens...

 

Now there has always an element of the surreal in this series...

 

About a lesbian drug addict, her trans love interest, who drew the attention of the hypermasculine football star, who had a pedophile dad who was doing the trans character...

And the football player also had a mean girl girlfriend...

Who became part of a love triangle with the oversexed sister...

Of the brainy girl...

Who fell for the lovable drug dealer...

 

Oh... and there was the fat girl...

 

Who finally got the attention she craved on OnlyFans...

 

Now this heady brew of dysfunctional and poorly parented teenagers...

Made major stars out of Zendaya, Jacob Elordi, and Sydney Sweeney...

 

And as Euphoria finally rode off into the sunset this season...

The kids are all out of high school...

 

Maddy has become a social media madame...

Jules found a sugar daddy who lets her paint all day in a beautiful high-rise apartment....

Rue is sort of sober and seems to be able to survive being a drug mule...

 

And a snitch...

 

Ok...

 

Like any of this was really going to happen...

 

Cassie is now a desperate housewife...

Married to Nate... who has become pathetic...

And in hock to some nasty Armenians because he is failing at running his father’s business...

Because of some protected plant that is preventing him from getting a building permit from one those California bureaucracies...

That will never let you build...anything...

 

Oh.. and the “happy couple” live in a house that looks like it has been untouched...

Since someone’s great grandmother died in 1953...

 

And this has “forced” Cassie ...

To play Little Piggy on Only Fans....

Because she wanted $40,000 worth of flowers at her wedding...

 

And since she is Cassie... she is loving the attention....

 

And has finally found her calling...

And her inner entrepreneur...

 

So one of the themes that courses through this season...

Is the way these women take charge of their lives...

 

And some of them decide to use sex, in one form or another, to exercise agency...

As if it was the most natural thing in the world...

And they do enjoy doing so...

In what I would call another of those You Go Girl moments our culture seems to be having...

 

Which would seem to be at odds with all those feminist complaints about the patriarchy...

 

But on the other side of that coin are the strippers at the Silver Slipper...

Who are used and abused...

 

Now Sam Levinson has a highly stylized touch...

And has filmed some great scenes this season...

Because he traffics in a carefully curated visual experience...

 

But restraint is not his bag...

 

Nor realism...

 

So the opening scene of this season has Rue driving a car up and over the Border Wall...

Over two thin metal tracks that look like they were borrowed from Jiffy Lube...

Anna Van Patten as Kitty the Stripper who goes to Mexico to get her butt “enhanced”

Which Levinson then shoves in our face every chance he gets...

And he had to have used AI for Kitty’s derriere’s transformation...

Or those were balloons....

 

Cassie launching into a scene from Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra ...

 

At an audition for a sitcom...

 

And Alamo the drug lord deciding to play polo with Rue’s head...

 

But the most memorable scene was Nate tied up and buried alive as a rattlesnake crawls up his chest...

 

People are still talking about that one...

 

So Levinson is certainly inventive...

 

And he seemed to be channeling Quentin Tarantino, The Sopranos, and Savages this season...

Because there is a lot of gratuitous violence, battles between drug lords...

And most of the action takes place in a strip club...

Run by a big black dude who fashions himself a cowboy...

 

Oh... and in one scene Rue is roped and brought down while on the run...

By a guy on a horse...

Like a calf at a rodeo...

 

So I guess you could call the third season of Euphoria...

A neo-western...

 

But some of the plot points don’t make sense...

 

Bishop’s betrayal at the end...

Why Maddy would help Cassie...

Or Alamo help Maddy in the way he did...

Which seemed out of proportion to what he was getting in return...

 

But no matter...

 

There are some riveting scenes in this season...

 

The most memorable was Colman Domingo’s soliloquy at AA...

Which was a tour de force...

 

And the scene where the fentanyl kicks in...

And you sense the subconscious realizing...

That no breaths are being taken...

And it is being starved of oxygen...

It gasps and struggles to get air...

But can’t...

 

But the most interesting aspect of this final season...

Was the way Levinson wove religious imagery into Euphoria...

 

Heh...I thought we were supposed to done with all that God stuff......

 

But from an episode titled “In God We Trust”

To Rue’s Come to Jesus moment in the church...

The Bible that travels from Rue to Lexi...

 

Who actually reads it...

 

Rue’s sanctuary in Texas...called Jerusalem...

Her haven... and place of peace...

Full of contented Christians...

 

Where a miracle calf is born...

 

And then there is...

 

The spontaneously burning bush Rue sees after a near death experience...

 

So there is a definite Old Testament feel in the final season...

With an eye for an eye shoot out...

 

But the final frame of the series has Rue sitting at a table looking like Jesus...

While everyone prays....

In a tableau that resembles Da Vinci’s The Last Supper....

 

Now this was all clearly intentional...

 

So what is Levinson up to?

 

Is he telling us he senses a move toward religion...

By a generation that feels lost and powerless...

In a sea of change...

 

So is all this religious imagery in Euphoria a portend...

Of some cultural moment Levinson is trying to tell us is on its way...

 

At this point, I’m not sure...

 

But very clearly religious imagery suffused the final season of Euphoria..

 

Which lays waste to the lives of many of the characters...

But especially Rue, Cassie, Maddy and Nate...

 

Which is why the crew at Vanity Fair have called this season...

“The Agony and Ecstasy of Euphoria”

 

Now this series has always been dark and depressing ...

 

But Levinson is an artiste ...

 

So it’s also always been hard to look away....

 

And this final season is no different...

 

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