Zendaya attends the Los Angeles red-carpet premiere of HBO's Euphoria. Photo / Getty Images
Zendaya, Sydney Sweeney and Jacob Elordi kept the twisted teen drama on our cultural radar, and it’s finally returning for a third (and probably final) season.
Even before the final episode of the second season of Euphoria aired in February 2022, HBO announced that the series had been renewed for Season 3.
Then four years went by.
Now, after much speculation about when – and if – the show would return, the third (and probably final) season of the Emmy-winning, darkly twisted teen drama finally debuted this week. Adapted from an Israeli series with the same name, Euphoria premiered in summer 2019 as instant nightmare fuel for parents, revolving around a group of high-schoolers struggling with drug addiction, sex, violence, substance abuse, and toxic relationships with adults and each other. Yet the series, in addition to shattering HBO ratings records, gained a loyal fan base.
It’s also a very patient fan base. Once, it would have been unimaginable for a TV series to go dormant for even a year. Yet in the streaming era, when viewers are able to watch almost any show on their own schedule – sometimes months or years after the rest of the world has discovered it – producers feel less urgency about the calendar and increasingly roll out new seasons on their own time, more akin to the pace of movie sequels. Young fans of Euphoria who didn’t grow up on the rigorous cycles of broadcast TV are unfazed when they have to wait nearly two years for a new Yellowjackets season or three years for the Stranger Things series finale.
“Today’s world of TV, there’s no rhyme or reason for anything,” said Marc Berman, founder of the website Programming Insider. “There’s no rules anymore – it’s kind of like, you do what you want to do.”
Still, four years is a very long time, he added. That means that excitement has been building. Viewers want to know: what does the cast look like now? Will it be strange seeing Zendaya, now a full-fledged A-list movie star, back in her old small-screen role? Where could these wild storylines possibly go next?
“With Euphoria, it was always a well-done show,” Berman said. “Coming back after all these years and waiting for it, I think, if anything, is beneficial. It’s event television.”
But while 20-somethings about to graduate college haven’t seen a new episode since they were in high school, it also feels like Euphoria never left. These are just some of the ways the series has persisted within our culture.
When HBO cast former teen actor-singer Zendaya (who was 22 when the series debuted) in the lead role as the young addict Rue, she was already famous from the Disney Channel, as well as supporting roles in big-screen epics Spider-Man: Homecoming and The Greatest Showman. But Euphoria launched her to another level. After wrenching storylines about Rue relapsing post-rehab, Zendaya won the Emmy for drama lead actress after both the first and second seasons, making history as the youngest actress to win the category, and the first black woman to win it twice. By the time she starred in the hit Dune film franchise in 2021, she was a certified superstar.
The celebrity-industrial complex became even more obsessed with Zendaya after the pulse-racing tennis movie Challengers, where she turned in a Golden Globe-nominated performance as an athlete caught up in a love triangle. Her fashion choices are dissected regularly, as is her relationship with her Spider-Man co-star and fiancé, Tom Holland; fake AI-generated photos from their wedding (which may or may not have happened yet) went viral to the point that even her loved ones were fooled.
Zendaya, who served as an executive producer on Euphoria, recently confirmed on The Drew Barrymore Show that she thinks this will be the last season. “Euphoria cracked my heart open,” she said. “Rue taught me so much about life.”
In recent years, there have been several moments when it has been impossible to go on the internet and not run into someone’s opinion about Sydney Sweeney. She rose in the Hollywood ranks with her sharp turn as a mean girl in the first season of HBO’s buzzy The White Lotus – a far cry from her naive Cassie on Euphoria. In 2023, she starred in Anyone But You, a box-office rom-com smash trailed by months of dating rumours about Sweeney and co-star Glen Powell, which Sweeney has said were simply a tabloid media creation.
But that hype was nothing compared with the stir last summer, when her American Eagle denim campaign with the punny tagline of “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans” was interpreted by some as promoting eugenics. The provocative ads sparked weeks of backlash, while Sweeney – nicknamed “MAGA Barbie” in some circles of the internet – declined to elaborate on the politics of it all, merely emphasising that she is “against hate”. Throw in her reported relationship with famed music manager (and Taylor Swift nemesis) Scooter Braun, and Sweeney remains at the centre of the discourse.
HBO set expectations early on that the third season might take a while, and the Writers Guild of America strike of spring and summer 2023 slowed things further. That July, 25-year-old actor Angus Cloud, who played Rue’s empathetic drug dealer, Fez, died of an accidental overdose. About six months later, HBO said production was going to be delayed but that it remained committed to the series.
What was going on? Variety reported on issues with the drafts of the Season 3 scripts and disagreements between series creator Sam Levinson, Zendaya and HBO over the show’s creative direction. In July 2024, the Hollywood Reporter published an in-depth feature about complicated dynamics behind the scenes with Levinson, especially after the death of executive producer Kevin Turen. The stories made waves well beyond the Euphoria fan base, casting doubt on the future of the show.
Hunter Schafer plays Jules, who develops a close relationship with Rue. The model-actor leveraged her Euphoria fame into roles in the latest Hunger Games movie and the upcoming Blade Runner 2099. Schafer, who is transgender, made headlines last year when she spoke out about President Donald Trump’s executive order limiting the gender options on passports to “male” and “female,” excising the “X” that many transgender travellers preferred.
Schafer went public after her passport was stolen while she was working in Spain and her new one was marked with “M,” complicating some of her interactions. “Trans people are beautiful,” she said in a TikTok protesting the change. “We are never going to stop existing. I’m never going to stop being trans. A letter and a passport can’t change that.”
Hollywood observers might have looked at Jacob Elordi’s breakout role – star of Netflix teen rom-com The Kissing Booth – and figured they could predict the path his career would take. They would have been incorrect.
The Australian actor could have tried to veer from Nate, his villainous high school quarterback Euphoria character, to more charming romantic leads. Instead, he dove into challenging roles with edgy, high-profile directors: he starred as Elvis Presley in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla and followed Emerald Fennell from Saltburn to Wuthering Heights. Elordi was so compelling in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein that he earned a 2026 Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor, though he lost to Sean Penn.
The days of the TV monoculture might be over, but social media remains flooded with Euphoria memes and quotes.
Two viral moments that still circulate include the infamous scene when Cassie has a nervous breakdown because she is secretly sleeping with Nate, the ex-boyfriend of her best friend, Maddy, played by Alexa Demie – as well as the famous question uttered by Maddy, “Wait, is this f***ing play about us?” (Ask a young person, they will explain further.)
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