Oh, Euphoria...

euphoria may very well be the most perplexing show i've ever seen i generally find myself struggling to buy into it but every now and then an episode will convince me that it's actually good and not just good in the sense that it was able to produce a good episode but said episode will convince me that the whole show was actually good all along and then the next week it'll revert to its old self and i'll have no idea what i was huffing the week before the thing is it's just a show i'm unable to meet on its own terms i can appreciate it as a collection of technically accomplished music videos essentially but whatever relationships and character arcs it wants me to invest myself in are impossible and i think this is a consequence of what euphoria demonstrates about a tourism gone sour sam levinson is drunk with power to a degree i don't think we've seen before on tv aside from maybe ryan murphy it's not unprecedented at this point for a show to give a single person the keys to the kingdom to write and direct every episode on their own after a successful first season but the examples i'm thinking of have all demonstrated at least a competent adherence to convention which can't exactly be said of euphoria's first season and that's not necessarily a bad thing i'm not going to knock a show on principle for defying convention and i'd even go so far as to say that euphoria's greatest moments of cinematic triumph are the direct result of this rebellion but the aspects that ultimately sink the show are a reminder of why those conventions have etched themselves into common practice in the first place and make a good case for why levinson needs a writer's room to reel him in i think what levenson demonstrated with malcolm and marie which is sort of informed the direction euphoria has gone in is that he often relies on very dense dialogue to convey his ideas but when i say dense i don't mean there's a lot to unpack within what the characters are saying i mean dense like a loaf of bread he didn't let rise he is just hacking his way through concepts in these drawn out conversations to the point where it almost feels self-congratulatory that he's maintained a dialogue scene for as long as he has this is of course most prevalent in the inner seas and specials of euphoria but a lot of conflict in the main show is resolved by just explicitly pounding away at these topics be it ali lecturing rue or any of the characters proclaiming in surreal monologue how they're feeling at a given point and as i use words like dialogue or conversation it occurs to me that so much of his dialogue is about conjuring up dialogues or conversations as in the conversation around blank hot topics that are alluded to as though these characters are deconstructing them or exploring the nuances of them when in reality they're just clunkily dancing circles around them and suggesting discourse you get the sense that rather than putting in the legwork to achieve catharsis he is attempting to reach it through brute force this approach to dialogue is sort of emblematic of levinson's entire framework with the show it's all attained through brute force the subject matter is certainly abrasive but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be written with more finesse addiction which is the main through line here is didactically discussed all the time but its symptoms only come through in the story in rue's character when it's convenient she shows little to no symptoms aside from acting a little goofy when she's high and then in one episode she's suddenly sick with withdrawals and pushed to the brink of breaking into houses and running into traffic going off the deep end and giving levinson the ability to say he's depicted the horrors of addiction because he's devoted an entire episode to it i'm no authority on addiction and i certainly don't want to discredit levinson's lived experience but just structurally this reads as brute [ __ ] force and the conversations about addiction don't do much for the show at this point either talking about something doesn't mean you're necessarily developing the idea of it anymore and remaining so explicit and abstract about these topics causes levinson's development to plateau pretty quickly euphoria's signature music video-esque sequences attempt to capture the headspace of addiction or love or whatever else it's conveying at the time which seems in a sense to reject the notion of cerebral or intellectual development in favor of capturing those ineffable amorphous emotions which i can get down with but he tries to have it both ways and that verbosity really weighs things down i think the biggest offense of brute force is the show's approach to characterization those 10-minute sequences at the start of each episode that serve to dictate each character's backstory which i've taken issue with from the start the concept here comes from a place of empathy pushing the idea that everyone has stuff going on behind the scenes that we don't know about and it's not necessarily a problem that those things aren't engaged with in the text of the present day story but they don't even inform subtext they are presented and they disappear from the show and levinson seems to think his work here is done fleshing out these characters when character comes from action and behavior rather than sheer factual biographical information actually that's not entirely fair it's not like the characters in euphoria are lacking in actions and behaviors that's one of the strongest things the show has going for it but these sequences suggest a lack of confidence on levinson's part in those things so he just front loads the characters with dense info dumps and the actions and behaviors that actually are present almost never have any real relationship to the information conveyed in the backstories i think cal is like the only character it actually plays a part in aside from i guess the obvious of rue and it's yet another thing that in theory interests me there's kuleshavian potential and character context informing later scenes that don't explicitly reference that context but it's not tapped into in any sort of compelling way here i've sort of been under the impression that i was in the minority about these things but i think the season two finale's missteps have begun to show people the light a little bit look at how the last two episodes a quarter of the season are pretty much entirely devoted to fez lexi and cassie so when roo the main character of the show obligatory has to resolve her threads to make it seem like a chapter is actually closed here levinson again chickens out of any real character legwork and opts to revisit the same heavy speech we've seen multiple times already present didactic monologues about how rue was feeling at face value and digress into an actual music video for a couple minutes i think he was going for something acoustic here literally an acoustic song but also something visually acoustic compared to the amped up visuals the rest of the show relies on to convey rue's sobriety but without the show's signature visual and editorial flair it becomes alarmingly clear how vapid moments like this actually are when there hasn't been sufficient character work in their conflict to make the resolution feel earned and as a result dominic fike gets meme to death i'm so torn on season 2 in general though there's a sentiment out there that it betrays the grounded character work and focused narrative of season 1 but i would argue that the first season is neither grounded nor focused i think this show has always been a messy spectacle of heightened reality and i think doubling down on that is exactly what needed to be done if it actually tried to serve as a manual for grounded ailments it would find itself in the same predicament 13 reasons why found itself in giving into sensationalism that ultimately undermines its psa approach euphoria is at least smart enough to be pure unadulterated sensationalism it of course alludes to those quote-unquote important dialogues and conversations i mentioned but it doesn't have the instructional cautionary quality of 13 reasons why i also find it so funny that 13 reasons why is far from a pg show and it strives for cinematic moments but euphoria has so much more sex and crime and drugs and profanity and uses so much more sophisticated lighting and editorial techniques it makes that show look like cobra kai that said euphoria may be well-shot pulp but it can't always be enjoyed as pulp the way i've always sort of described it in my head is that the show puts the most active filmmaking in service of the most passive storytelling roo will tell us in a couple sentences of voice over what a character has been up to for the past couple weeks and then we'll get 5 to 10 minutes of those characters brooding around in some rooms getting flooded with blade runner 2049 lighting in an hour-long episode only a handful of things actually happen i imagine the writing process is more a series of mood boards than actual teleplay material this i suppose challenges the difference between filmmaking and storytelling is it good filmmaking if it's not propelling a story well is concrete narrative even a useful metric the answer to these questions is of course not necessarily but tv specifically tends to rely on plot more than film so as to stay tethered to something and not get lost in the ether over hours and hours of material this is why it's popularly considered a writer's medium and why directors are so often mere placeholders in a show's production so i respect and admire that euphoria tries to break this notion being more a showcase of direction than writing film is a visual medium and blah blah blah so i get what they're trying to do here but it swings so far in the opposite direction that the visuals aren't really in service of anything the word medium denotes that something is being transferred visual medium implies that something is being transferred by visual means but with euphoria i often feel like the only thing being delivered is the visuals themselves and you know what sometimes that's enough coupled with the outrageous reality out the window antics of season 2 and a gazillion dollars on its side the show hits sometimes it really does i mean say what you will but it really has established its own language of aesthetics makeup and wardrobe a specific brand of brain-dead teens elevated by the fact that they all look 30 years old they're just [ __ ] boneheads nate with his little road beer is the exact kind of stupid [ __ ] i tune in for and while we're talking about the road beer i should say that to the show's credit even though these segmented sequences aren't always moving the story along there is often well executed self-contained tension in the filmmaking that almost makes it harder to watch because you're begging the show to put its technically impressive tools to use on something worthwhile and it so often doesn't i think the real liabilities with the show though are its self-importance and of course the inconsistencies with the writing which i promise i'll get into in a minute ever since that family guy godfather clip it's kind of impossible to use the phrase it insists upon itself about a piece of art but i'll be damned if euphoria doesn't insist upon itself and maybe the vapidness of the show would sit better with me if these sequences weren't bludgeoning me with the notion that i'm watching something important and engaging in the profound cultural conversation but i don't think that quality is actually separable from the approach of the engaging visuals and at the end of the day as much as the show flaunts its directorial flourishes and rebels against the notion of narrative importance it is a tv show and it is not experimental enough to reject narrative outright so it still has to set up threads and bring them home within the confines of convention and let me tell you it is much better at the former than the latter the second to last episode of season two is the most recent time i questioned my entire stance on the show what's not to love here tense cross-cutting self-mythologizing indulgent act breaks everyone's put in the same room and we're gonna see how all these conflicts come to a head it was also the first episode i watched with other people so i could feel the communal high tv is so good at instilling and for an hour there it all clicked but this was followed the next week by the show systematically going through each thread and bringing them all to the most underwhelming conclusions imaginable i don't know if it's even worth it to go through each thread and point out where the show goes wrong i'm certainly not going to give it the 13 reasons why treatment but that's because sam levinson doesn't seem to have given any of this any thought in the first place and he's so high on his own success he doesn't have any lackeys to point out his inconsistencies anymore people attribute a lot of the character work namely cat getting sidelined and nate not sharing any scenes with rural jewels except for one on behind the scenes drama but a good writer should be able to play the hand they're dealt and even play into the setbacks which levinson doesn't really do it is astonishing just how inconsistent the season is though the most representative example that comes to mind is spending all this time on nate threatening maddie with a gun to get the tapes back and returning them to jewels with rue narrating his rationale for not sending cal to jail while he didn't know much about real estate he did know there wasn't much of a market for homes built by a pedophile and then two episodes later he has cal arrested with all the videos on a thumb drive and the reason he gives is the recurring dream he has of cal [ __ ] him that we just saw once in the previous episode which is treated as though it's been a season-long problem for nade not only does this undermine the story beats we've been watching and facilitate a non-ending to the cassie situation which has arguably been given more focus this season than anything else but it also undermines rue's narration why have her narrate for the other characters if we're not getting the proper insight on them it's not like having her as an unreliable narrator is a comment on her freight relationship with everyone i don't even think she's supposed to be an unreliable narrator for anyone besides herself she's usually right but more importantly decisions like this feel like levinson is just writing by free association he has the memory of a goldfish and when they're not straight up contradictions to what we've previously seen their character moments that either haven't been set up or just don't make any sense ashtray pulling a slumdog millionaire is as inexplicable as it was in slumdog millionaire there's also the loose ends left unaddressed like rue being indebted to lori i've seen a lot of benefit of the doubt given to the show like people assuming rue's debts have been paid off by lori sedating and trafficking her to the 10 000 threshold but rue clearly breaks out of the house and lori has been established as very anal about financial matters and even if she didn't come back for the rest of the season just an indicator that she's out there or that the conflict is resolved would do wonders literally just one moment where roo so much as thinks about what happened that's all it needs i'm not even going to ask the show to attempt any cohesion between the plots roo and jewels are totally separate from everything else happening in the show which could very easily be played into to demonstrate rue alienating herself and the show doesn't really do that but whatever before we worry about more macro stuff like that i just want levinson to be able to resolve a single threat on its own first if that stream of consciousness in consideration for what he's already written approach is how he's able to cook up the crazy moments that are season two's highs then i don't want to take that from him it even ironically feeds into my interests at times like causing him to ditch the character backstory intro thing after trying to keep it up this season for like three episodes but if he just had someone behind him cleaning up his wake and tying those loose ends together it would be such an easy fix that would elevate the material tenfold i refuse to buy into the notion of oh the messy narrative is in service of the messy world and the messy lives of these characters that becomes a cop-out very quickly and levinson is miles past the threshold of cop out here and if he secretly does have lackeys polishing up his scripts and going uncredited interns or something then that's another story entirely all this being said though i have to concede that euphoria season 2 is a success for levinson and for hbo that it's even a watchable final product feels like he crash-landed a plane but in a game of sheer numbers this fact is indisputable euphoria has become hbo's second most watched show ever and it's more than just that the stranglehold it has on the culture is something that's been missing from tv for a few years now i know in my succession video i gave a zeitgeist reason for euphoria not being as big a show as succession but to my chagrin i was dead wrong over the past two months you could just tweet a character's name even something generic like lexi and your tweet would light like wildfire it would combust it would catch the most contagious case of discourse fever we've ever seen and the beauty of this levinson's actual talent here is that because he seems to have invested nothing into storytelling he's cast all his skill points into marketability and twitter moments and i know aiming for twitter moments is a practice that's looked down upon but i think there's something to be said for engaging with an audience on that level quote unquote respectable art as we've understood it prioritizes its own purposes and has more separation from audience demands this is of course the right move to avoid falling into the fan service trap and feeding viewers slop that won't challenge or push them in any way but euphoria weaponizes this audience relationship in a unique way when it does something crazy and unearned the stans tweet about how crazy it is and get a hundred thousand retweets and the naysayers tweet about how unearned it is and get a hundred thousand retweets then the tweets generate more viewers and the viewers generate more tweets and the show becomes hbo's second most popular show ever after just two seasons and more importantly it takes the number one spot in the public consciousness for both favorable and unfavorable reasons the ability to achieve such provocation on both sides of the zeitgeist is genuinely admirable you want a piece of art to speak for itself so as to stand the test of time but euphoria is almost a piece of performance art so tuned into the moment and conversing with an active and temporally present audience that even if it doesn't hold up as a tv show it's cementing itself historically as a cultural phenomenon that i think should be considered a significant achievement for this reason i think the meta thing they're doing with lexi's play as a microcosm for the show actually works there are moments of genuinely impressive direction and blocking well-constructed individual scenes but the narrative logistics of the show were impossible and the whole thing is way too expensive and spectacle-heavy to capture the authentic high school experience it claims to strive for we even get a lion addressing the show's narrative chaos don't question it that's the brilliance of lexi howler which i'm sure is a tongue-in-cheek line about sam levinson but that one teeter's a little too far over the line for my liking the play is better enjoyed as a series of setups than payoffs which is also why episode 207 part one of the play is the more engaging episode and like euphoria itself lexi's play is most enjoyed not as a self-contained work but because of the unique spectacle that occurs with its relationship to the audience i think moving forward with the show we can expect more of the same narrative [ __ ] and unearned character arcs with innovative setups and impressive editing techniques i think to up the ante it runs the risk of becoming a full-blown crime show in season 3 especially if we get a cal prison arc and possibly bring tyler back into the equation but if that's the case it could become a little trite part of what made season 2 the phenomenon it's been is the sheer whiplash of how overblown the crime stuff has gotten and if audiences are consequently prepared for that it could lose some of its provocative power but it's euphoria maybe sam levinson's third eye is two steps ahead of us all and he'll find a new way to prod the culture until then i feel like i've been personally served enough food to mull over for the next couple years and become ever more perplexed by where i actually stand on the show what's undeniable is that i was waiting with baited breath for each new episode and i'll be on my couch at 9pm sunday night whenever in 2024 season 3 actually comes out as always let me know what you thought of the season in the comments hot takes and predictions and whatever else you're chomping at the bit to get out i'll be here reading links to my social media and patreon are in the description thank you for watching and goodbye you

Channel: Taylor J. Williams

Views: 106,888

Keywords: Euphoria, HBO, Zendaya, Sam levinson, Jacob elordi, Hunter Schafer, Alexa demie, Sydney sweenie, Maude apatow, Barbie Ferreira, Angus cloud, Rue, Jules, Cassie, Maddy, Nate jacobs, Cal Jacobs, Lexi, Kat, Fez, Fezco, Ashtray

Id: fkpDjK4w80E

Length: 20min 4sec (1204 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 13 2022