‘Euphoria’ Season 2: Bloody Penises, Drug Binges, and Heart Attacks
After a two-plus-year hiatus, HBO’s teen drama is back — and leaning into its over-the-top impulses with plenty of sex, drugs, violence, and big feelings to go around
In an upcoming episode of the HBO high-school drama Euphoria, one of the show’s characters is confronted by an armed intruder in her bedroom and forced to participate in a game of Russian Roulette. After the twisted contest has concluded, the camera pans to her dresser, where her phone displays a text from a friend who’s apoplectic over the way her boyfriend just spoke to her.
Among the things that Euphoria best captures is the sense that in adolescence, everything that happens to you, no matter how major or minor, can carry the same hyperbolic weight — that anything positive somehow feels like a trip to paradise, and anything negative is an Armageddon.
Those extreme reactions hold true to Euphoria itself, which is returning for a second full season after being mostly absent for the last two and a half years due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The new episodes offer scenes that are so insightful or artfully presented that Euphoria can feel in that moment like one of the very best shows television has produced in a while. Then others are so exasperating and self-indulgent that they can leave you questioning whether you liked the better parts at all. Sometimes, the same scene can conjure both reactions at once.
Locker Room Dicks In All Their Glory… Dicks are coming back bloodily…
During the long hiatus between seasons, Euphoria creator Sam Levinson wrote and directed two minimalist specials, each focusing on one of his two central characters: relapsed drug addict Rue (Zendaya) sharing her sense of suicidal despair with her NA sponsor Ali (Colman Domingo); and Rue’s estranged girlfriend Jules (Hunter Schafer, who co-wrote with Levinson) grappling with her feelings about both her gender transition and Rue. The Rue episode was sensational — a quiet tour de force for Zendaya, Domingo, and Levinson — and the Jules one both excellent and dramatically necessary, since Season One offered far briefer glimpses of her interior life. Stripped of the show’s usual excesses of style and tone, the specials were such compellingly intimate character pieces that offered the tantalizing possibility of a change in Levinson’s approach to the whole series once he had the cast and crew back at full strength.
Any illusions of that fizzle, though, within the opening minutes of tonight’s Season Two premiere, which feature a woman — Kitty (Katherine Narducci), the grandmother of the series’ affable young drug dealer Fezco (Angus Cloud) — marching into a strip club, interrupting a man mid-blow job, and shooting him in the leg while we see blood spray onto his erect penis. Euphoria: Same as it ever was! That extremely caffeinated style extends to our reintroduction to the rest of the ensemble: supervillain jock Nate (Jacob Elordi), queen bee Maddy (Alexa Demie), opposite sisters Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) and Lexi (Maude Apatow), occasional cam girl Kat (Barbie Ferreira), plus new kid Elliot (Dominic Fike). We’re flung into a wild New Year’s Eve party(*) in which one character gets savagely beaten, another has a urine-soaked washcloth thrown in their face, and another briefly goes into cardiac arrest. Things do not get calmer as the season moves along… More Here
Hunter Schafer And Zendaya
Zendaya Maree Stoermer Coleman, known mononymously as Zendaya, is an American actress, singer, and dancer. From 2010 to 2013, she starred in the Disney Channel sitcom Shake It Up as Rocky Blue. Wikipedia
Zendaya tight plot in Malcolm and Marie