Unpopular opinion: Euphoria Is Borderline Misogynistic & That’s the Whole Point...

For years, Euphoria has been praised as the defining visual language of Gen Z; stylised, chaotic, emotionally raw. But with Season 3, something has shifted. And not in the way its creator, Sam Levinson, might think. What once felt like an unfiltered exploration of youth now feels like something else entirely: indulgent, voyeuristic and, at times, deeply uncomfortable for all the wrong reasons.

The Problem: When One Voice Becomes Too Loud

There’s a reason most prestige television relies on a writers’ room. Euphoria doesn’t.

Levinson writes alone, and in Season 3, it shows. The characters no longer feel like individuals navigating trauma, addiction, and identity. They feel like extensions of a singular gaze. A gaze that, increasingly, seems less interested in understanding its characters and more interested in exposing them. Female leads, in particular, are no longer complex; they are staged. Positioned within narratives of sex work, performance, and hyper-sexualisation that feel less like commentary and more like fixation. At some point, you stop asking what the show is saying - and start asking who it’s really for.

Rue Can’t Save This Anymore

There was always one anchor: Rue Bennett. Rue was the emotional core. The reason viewers stayed. The reason the chaos felt grounded. Even now, she arguably still gets the strongest writing; the only character Levinson seems to treat with genuine care. But here’s the problem: one well-written character cannot carry an entire collapsing universe. By Episode 3, even Rue’s presence isn’t enough to make you care about what’s happening around her. The supporting cast, once layered and magnetic — now feels hollow, reduced to spectacle rather than story.

From Storytelling to Spectacle

What made Euphoria powerful wasn’t just its aesthetic; it was its tension between beauty and truth.

Season 3 abandons that balance.

Instead, it leans fully into spectacle:

• more explicit scenes

• more exaggerated dynamics

• more shock, less substance

  
  

And somewhere along the way, the line between critique and participation disappears.

The camera doesn’t just observe anymore; it lingers. It stares. It leans in.

At times, it feels less like storytelling and more like complicity.

The Uncomfortable Question No One Wants to Ask

Has Euphoria become the very thing it once critiqued? What started as a commentary on the commodification of youth, beauty, and trauma now risks becoming a product of it. A show that once exposed the machinery of desire is now arguably feeding it, packaging its characters in ways that feel designed not for empathy, but for consumption. And that’s where the discomfort turns into something sharper:

Is this still art or just aestheticised exploitation?

The Cultural Shift: When Audiences Start to Turn

The most telling sign isn’t the content; it’s the reaction. Viewers aren’t just shocked anymore. They’re disengaged. There’s a growing sense that the show has lost its emotional credibility. That it no longer trusts its audience to care without being provoked. And when a show has to push this hard just to hold attention, it raises a bigger issue: Maybe the problem isn’t that audiences have changed. Maybe the show has.

Final Thought

Season 3 of Euphoria doesn’t fail because it’s too bold. It fails because it mistakes provocation for depth. And in doing so, it reveals something uncomfortable, not about Gen Z, not about culture, but about the limits of a story told from a single, unchecked perspective. Because when no one is there to challenge the vision,what you’re left with isn’t genius. It’s exposure.