Euphoria’s Beautiful Lie About Addiction and Pain

Euphoria arrived as HBO’s attempt at a searching, R-rated portrait of American teenage life, and it succeeded well enough to become one of the network’s biggest shows in years. The series is adapted from an international show of the same name, reworked for an American setting by writer-director Sam Levinson. It also produces one of the more persistent complaints in recent television criticism: that its visual polish does a lot of work to make hard subjects, including addiction, depression, and controlling relationships, look more appealing than the story intends.

The show’s surface is not subtle. Neon lighting, elaborate makeup, a wall-to-wall soundtrack, and music-video camera work surround nearly every scene, including the ones dealing with overdose, self-harm, and abuse. Defenders describe that style as essential to putting the audience inside a teenager’s heightened emotional state. Critics counter that style this loud tends to overwhelm whatever message sits underneath it, and that a show aimed at a teenage audience does not get the same latitude a music video does.

The show’s influence went beyond the screen almost immediately. Its makeup looks, glitter eyeliner, and rhinestone application became a genuine beauty trend, copied in tutorials and campaigns aimed at roughly the same teenage audience the show is nominally warning. That crossover is worth pausing on. A series about the cost of self-destructive behavior also produced one of the decade’s more successful teen beauty moments, and that outcome is itself a piece of evidence for the argument that the look of the show outruns its message.

The clearest example is Rue, the show’s narrator and central character, played by Zendaya. Her drug use destroys her relationships and her health over the course of the series, and the show does not shy away from showing the wreckage. But it also stages her worst moments, including a relapse and an overdose, with the same lighting, wardrobe, and choreography it uses for scenes built purely to look good. Season one’s finale takes that furthest: Rue’s overdose is rendered as an actual musical number, complete with a full band and choreography, before cutting to her collapsed on the bathroom floor. The show’s own framing treats the sequence as Rue’s subjective experience of the high rather than an endorsement of it. But both readings play out on the same screen in the same three minutes, and there is no guarantee a teenage audience weighs them equally.

That is the core of the complaint, and it holds up better than most objections to prestige television usually do. A series can depict addiction honestly and still dress it in enough style that the depiction reads as aspirational to at least some of the people watching. Euphoria‘s harshest critics argue that is exactly what happens here, that gorgeous lighting and expensive wardrobe turn a cautionary story into something closer to a mood board, and that the same treatment extends to the show’s relationships, where possessive and manipulative dynamics get filmed with the same romantic glow as its healthier ones. The relationship between the characters Nate and Maddy is the clearest case: a dynamic built on jealousy, control, and recurring conflict, shot with the same lush lighting and needle-drop soundtrack the show uses for its most swoon-worthy moments.

That argument has played out well beyond television criticism. Advocacy groups, including the Parents Television and Media Council, have publicly pressed HBO over pairing explicit content with marketing and tie-in merchandise clearly aimed at teenagers, the same audience the show’s own rating is meant to restrict. HBO has defended both the content and the rating, but the gap between who the show is officially rated for and who it is evidently reaching is real, and it is a large part of why the series keeps reopening this argument season after season.

None of that means the show is dishonest about what it depicts, and its defenders have a real case. Sam Levinson, who created the series and writes most of its episodes, has spoken publicly about his own history with addiction, and that experience clearly shapes Rue’s arc. Rue also narrates her own story while repeatedly undercutting her own reliability, telling the audience directly not to take her account at face value, a more self-aware structure than the show tends to get credit for. Zendaya’s performance won a Primetime Emmy for the role, recognition that reflects how unglamorous the work reads up close, even inside scenes lit like a music video.

HBO also released two quieter bridge episodes between the first two seasons, shot under pandemic restrictions, and the one centered on Rue drops nearly all of the visual spectacle the rest of the series runs on. It is essentially two people, Rue and her sponsor Ali, talking in a diner on Christmas Eve about relapse, self-deception, and what recovery actually costs. That episode is the strongest evidence the show can handle this material without the production polish, and how rare that restraint is across the rest of the run is the real complaint. If Euphoria can tell the truth about addiction with nothing but a booth and a conversation, the choice to reach for spectacle everywhere else says something about what the show values when it has the option.

None of this amounts to an argument that Euphoria should not exist, or that difficult subjects are off-limits for television. Plenty of good films and shows have covered addiction honestly without softening the damage it causes; Requiem for a Dream is the standard comparison, and it earns it. The complaint is narrower and more useful: Euphoria wants the style and the warning in the same frame, and it trusts every viewer to sort out which one they are supposed to walk away with. Some will. A show aimed substantially at teenagers, who often watch without much adult supervision, should probably not be betting the whole show on that.