Euphoria Season 2 review: Zendaya's cult HBO show is the most effective when it's thoughtful, not explicit

Euphoria, the famed HBO series that often feels like the raunchier, unhinged cousin of Netflix’s Sex Education had been on hiatus for around two years.

An unlikely cult hit, the first season became the stuff of legend for how casually it hyper-sexualised teenage life within the frameworks of a fantastical but ultimately explicit visual language. In between the first and second seasons, the show even released to standalone episodes to respond to near global clamour for biting into something that has always dripped with bloody, violent energy.

The second season resumes where the first left off with Rue, Jules and the gang in Los Angeles navigating the aftermath of an explosive first season that established the show as simultaneously one of the bleakest and most beautiful things on television.

We return in this new season with a New Year’s Eve party with a surprised deep-dive into the unlikely breakout star of the series, Fezco, Rue’s reluctant drug dealer played by an ethereal and often un-ironically hilarious Angus Cloud. One of the great things about Euphoria is how it teases conflict in the most stylized, unconcerned ways possible. And yet it can also be the weakness of the show, overemphasizing its capacity to visually stay ahead of its audience.

The first episode is evidence of both, wanting to be a thrifty noir but ultimately submitting to its music-video like aesthetics. Fezco confronts Nate, the poisonous male centre of a show that largely deals with the trauma of young women. Nate has also come close to Cassie in a needless soapy intertwining of threads that a show so unconventional could have done away with.

The second season introduces new characters like Dominic Fike’s benevolent drug abuser Eliott, who becomes an accomplice in Rue’s relapse, and new arcs like the unlikely warmth between Fezco and Lexi, a Beauty and the Beast-kind of reconciliation of life’s two extremes. On the face of it, plenty is happening in the second season, but because Euphoria has always wanted to kick the bucket in terms of dressing, a lot of it can feel scandalous and explicit for the sake of it.

In one scene, Nate’s abusive father calls out his family with his penis hanging out. It is audacities like this that often make it hard to reaffirm Euphoria as some hyper-sensualised vision of teenage hell. Everyone is a nightmare and their own worst enemy in this series, and sometimes their deep-seated psychological handicaps can feel like ammunition for the camera, rather than thought for the script or the story. 

While a lot of the second season feels like a doubling down on the shock and angst of the first, there are some standout episodes that are reminders of just how moving the series can be when it wants to be serious rather than just provocative.

Rue, played by the terrific Zendaya in a career-defining role, brings the house down in the fifth episode that is shrill, vicious, and almost too painful at times. Rue’s relapse has been victim of the show’s artificial poetic until this point but in the fifth episode, the prickly antique wrapped in gloss tears open its insides, and the result is almost too disturbing and affecting. Zendaya guts the screen in a maximised portrayal of tragedy slowly becoming a person. It is cacophonous, difficult, and almost too disconcerting.

Compared to the fifth episode, Lexi’s high school play, that makes up the entire seventh episode, is both whimsical and messy. As the play walks us through Lexi’s window-seat view of having watched the people around her confronting inexplicable lives, there is a belated sprinkling of the fairy-tale optimism that every now and then reaches out to those dismembered by the ask of the show’s world. 

Euphoria has always been stunningly performed but it has, in the process of embellishing its visual heights, often sunk to grasp at narrative lows to keep its chaotic chain of thought moving. In this second season, the show struggles to take forward arcs like that of Rue and Jules, and undefinable characters like Nate who remain fascinating but are beginning to look shallow for a lack of clear direction other than the motivation to cursorily offend.

The show can often become too gratuitous and self-serving in its allegorical version of heaven where all forms of pleasure also come cursed with a form of pain. Nate somewhat redeems himself in this second season but is restricted from embracing any form of essentiality. It is almost as if the show cannot decide if any of its characters can now be allowed to grow and graduate out of the chaos they create for themselves. Or whether they should be consigned to the elasticity of fate, that any future is simply some small cosmetic version of the present. 

While the inability of the show to merge good writing into a perversely stylised environment emerges as its biggest flaw in the second season, Euphoria remains fascinating even in the many ways it walks, leaps, and falls short. Because it does so with sincerity, with hard-boiled conviction that though it might be a weakness, is also the reason why the creative choices of the show have pillared its unsubstantiated but inevitable growth. It can often feel like an aggregation of literary quotes, but even their individual, disconnected beauty, they can overwhelm.

It is never going to be a weekend watch nor a show you would want to return to again and again, but by god is it transformative, nuclear, in the loudest, most unobscured of ways possible. 

Euphoria Season 2 is streaming in India on Disney+ Hotstar.

Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between.

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by Manik Sharma