5 Reasons Why Euphoria Season 3 Failed

This article contains discussions of addiction.

Contains spoilers for "Euphoria" Season 3

The third season of "Euphoria" — which made it onto Looper's annual list of the worst TV shows of the year thus far — is over, as is the show. After the finale "In God We Trust" aired on Sunday, May 31, the series' showrunner, creator, and sole writer Sam Levinson revealed to The New York Times that he has no plans for a fourth season, and frankly, that's for the best. Season 3 of "Euphoria" pretty clearly revealed that there's nowhere for this show to go.

Not only is the show's protagonist Rue Bennett (Zendaya) dead — dying of a fentanyl overdose just 45 minutes into the interminable 93 minute run-time of "In God We Trust" — but so is her fellow original main character Nate Jacobs (Jacob Elordi), who dies in the series' penultimate episode "Rain or Shine." That leaves Maddy Perez (Alexa Demie), sisters Cassie and Lexi Howard (Sydney Sweeney and Maude Apatow), and Jules Vaughn (Hunter Schafer), all of whom either got humiliated or shafted during Season 3 of "Euphoria." There is, truly, nowhere to go from here.

So what made Season 3 of "Euphoria" so unbearable from beginning? Where to begin? There are a lot of reasons, to be extremely frank, but there are five completely undeniable reasons for its failure. From a long delay between seasons to outright character assassinations to Levinson's lazy attempts to force emotional depth, here's why Season 3 of "Euphoria" was so terrible.

It's troubling that most popular TV shows make fans wait years between seasons — we're looking at you, "Severance" — and eve though the "Euphoria" delay was unavoidable due to a number of factors, it didn't help the third season at all. In 2024, Variety reported that the show's third season was being delayed yet again, after getting through the 2023 strikes between the acting and writing guilds in Hollywood and the tragic, untimely death of one of its stars Angus Cloud (who played Fezco O'Neill, a drug dealer with a heart of gold). Then there were the rumors about issues between Zendaya and Sam Levinson after her private detective concept for Season 3 got (reportedly) shot down, and at a certain point, the world started wondering if Season 3 of "Euphoria" would happen at all.

Sadly, it did — and Levinson's solution to the lengthy delay was to devise a five-year time jump that brought the characters out of high school and into the "real world," so to speak. This was Levinson's only realistic solution, and thanks to his narrow-minded view of what these particular characters would do in said real world, it turned out pretty terribly. Still, nothing about the massive four-year delay between Season 2 and Season 3 of "Euphoria" helped the show's fate in the slightest.

This second point is, sort of, related to the "long delay" issue — which is that, between Season 2 and Season 3 of "Euphoria," everybody in the cast got obscenely famous. Consider, if you will, that Season 2 of "Euphoria" concluded in February of 2022. Between then and Euphoria's Season 3 premiere on April 12, 2026, the cast's profiles all pretty uniformly rose.

Hunter Schafer, for one, appeared in buzzy projects like "Mother Mary," "Cuckoo," and "The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes," and Sydney Sweeney became a household name thanks to super-successful films including "Anyone But You," "Immaculate," and the massive 2025 box office hit "The Housemaid." Zendaya — who won two Emmys for "Euphoria" before that delay — proved she could balance hugh franchises like "Dune" and "Spider-Man" while also delivering absolutely killer performances in independent fare like Luca Guadagnino's "Challengers" and Kristoffer Borgli's "The Drama." Jacob Elordi shone in films like "Saltburn" and became the first "Euphoria" cast member to get a freakin' Oscar nomination thanks to his turn as Frankenstein's monster in Guillermo del Toro's "Frankenstein." (Alexa Demie didn't get a lot of play between seasons, which feels criminal. She's so talented! More people should book her!)

By the time "Euphoria" Season 3 actually dropped, it sort of felt like none of the actors needed the show, meaning that the energy of most scenes indicated that nobody really wanted to be there. (Elordi, in particular, seemed to shoot the vast majority of his scenes just with his on-screen wife Sweeney or alone, making it seem like the series could only book him for a week or so.) Sam Levinson couldn't have seen this coming, but as he's proven, he doesn't have a particularly strong vision.

In an interview with IndieWire in April 2026 — shortly after Season 3 premiered — Sam Levinson explained why "Euphoria" pivoted from a high school drama to a Western that evokes better projects like "Breaking Bad" and "True Romance." As he told the outlet:

"[The western] merged with where our characters would be at this time. They're out in the big, bad world, and they have total freedom. They can choose who they want to be. They can decide to follow whatever ambition or desire they want, but at the same time, they have to deal with the consequences of it.  And so there was something that felt very potent about it [leaning into the genre]."

That's an interesting rationalization, but there's one major problem here: Levinson doesn't have the subtlety, sharp vision, or interior depth, apparently, to pull this off. The Americana-Western theme of Season 3, which paints Rue as an outlaw roaming the desert and kills Jacob Elordi's Nate with a rattlesnake, feels empty. Levinson claims, in that quote, that the Western theme was meant to help explore how "free" all of the characters are, but as we'll explain elsewhere in this article, not a single one of them appears to have free will or even much inner strength as they're pushed and pulled in various directions. Levinson wanted to deliver some searing message about life in America and addiction, but he missed the mark so wildly that reading his intention behind the season just comes off as baffling in hindsight.

As we mentioned earlier, Jacob Elordi's scenes as Nate Jacobs in Season 3 of "Euphoria" felt particularly bizarre in that he was either alone or exclusively paired with Sydney Sweeney — giving the distinct impression that he didn't spend much time on set. Frankly, it barely matters either way ... because Nate wasn't given a storyline of any real significance in Season 3. When it opens, he's in debt to a powerful mercenary type named Naz (Jack Topalian), and that's just ... his whole deal. He marries Cassie, and he's still in debt. Naz shows up and cuts off two toes and his ring finger, and Nate is still in debt. Ultimately, he gets buries alive and then killed by a rattlesnake that uses a pipe to find its way into his coffin. To call Nate's storyline in Season 3 of "Euphoria" useless is an understatement, and it's an insult to Elordi's sheer talent.

Unfortunately, one of his fellow cast members, Hunter Schafer, ended up with an even worse fate — she didn't even get a cool death scene or experience any conflict that would have given Schafer some real opportunity to perform. Instead, here's how it goes for Schafer's Jules: she drops out of art school, starts sugar dating, and meets a ton of wealthy men who are happy to pay her handsomely. Then, she meets the wealthiest of them — "True Blood" veteran Sam Trammell — who spends most of an early tryst wrapping Jules head to toe in Saran Wrap, which seemed to indicate something sinister.

It didn't. Ellis' predilections came to nothing. Besides a single episode where Jules books and loses a job working on a painting for Lexi's job, Jules does nothing. It's embarrassing, honestly, that Levinson wronged two of his most talented actors this badly.

At the end of the day, people are going to remember the third season of "Euphoria" for its grossest and most "shocking" moments, like Rue feverishly swallowing bags of drugs to work as a mule for the dangerous dealer Laurie (Martha Kelly) or Cassie donning a diaper (yes, seriously) and popping a pacifier into her mouth for an OnlyFans shoot. (After this particular scene aired, Variety ran an article where they spoke to real OnlyFans creators, who weren't happy and pointed out that the platform doesn't allow shoots of that nature.) That's, ultimately, the most depressing thing about Season 3 of "Euphoria" — its legacy is how it demeaned its cast members.

Throughout Season 3, Rue is at the mercy of one dangerous figure or another and ends up in ridiculous situations like being buried in dirt from the neck down ... and she develops a frantic and out-of-nowhere obsession with faith and the redeeming power of God. Sweeney's Cassie turns into Godzilla (in a bizarre fantasy sequence) and performs a number of deeply embarrassing scenes, including the aforementioned one in the diaper. The only female character who doesn't get absolutely humiliated in Season 3 is Lexi, but she also doesn't do anything of much importance, so that's why.

"Euphoria" Season 3 felt exploitative and even cruel from beginning to end, giving little to no resolution or finality to a single character — even Rue, whose death by overdose would have been more impactful and made more sense if it was crafted by a better writer than Sam Levinson. Good riddance, "Euphoria" ... and congratulations to its stars, who are now free.