Euphoria has been off the air since 2022, but the long wait for Season 3 now carries a different weight. A new review of the show describes the next chapter as a “thrilling, disturbing horror show,” a sharp turn for a series that began in 2019 as a teen drama about the lives of friends in East Highland, a Southern California suburb.
The show’s center has always been Rue, the opioid-addicted narrator played by Zendaya, and the rest of the ensemble has helped define its slippery appeal. Nate is played by Jacob Elordi, Maddy by Alexa Demie, Cassie by Sydney Sweeney, Lexi by Maude Apatow and Jules by Hunter Schafer. Fezco, played by Angus Cloud, was part of that world too until Cloud died of an overdose in 2023, a loss that hangs over any conversation about where the series goes next.
That matters now because the break in production was not just a calendar gap. The hiatus followed the end of Season 2 in 2022 and was tied to the Hollywood strikes, Cloud’s death and rumored tensions among some of the young actors and between them and creator Sam Levinson. In that context, a show once described as having “something of the lava lamp about it” has come to look less like a glossy teen drama than a story still trying to find its own shape after years of disruption.
Euphoria itself was adapted from an Israeli series of the same name from the twenty-tens, and its reputation has always rested on excess as much as emotion. One description of it called it “Euphoria is a big, vulgar, carnivalesque thing,” which fits the series’ ability to swing between stylized beauty and ugliness in the same scene. Season 3 now inherits that legacy while carrying the baggage of everything that kept it away from viewers for so long.
The friction is clear: the show’s return is being discussed less as a clean restart than as a test of whether its most recognizable strengths can survive the years it lost. If Season 3 really does feel like a horror show, that is not a contradiction. It is the point.
