Every Reason Why Zendaya’s ‘Euphoria’ Season 3 Divided Fans and Critics

Euphoria Season 3 has wrapped with a brutal fate for one of its main characters. The third season did not hold back in delivering some of its most shocking moments. However, it was also a season that drew divided opinions from critics about a series that had previously earned a good reputation over its two seasons. As Sean Boelman noted in our review of Euphoria Season 3, it takes “some ambitious swings both narratively and stylistically,” but ultimately is not as effective as the previous season.

Euphoria	Details
Creator, Writer, and Showrunner	Sam Levinson
Cast	Zendaya, Hunter Schafer, Jacob Elordi, Sydney Sweeney, Alexa Demie, Maude Apatow, Martha Kelly, Chloe Cherry, and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje
RT Score (as of June 1, 2026)	77% | 74%
IMDb Score (as of June 1, 2026)	8.2/10

Creator Sam Levinson has confirmed during an interview with Popcast that the show is officially ending after its third season. So, what went wrong with the show that was previously a critical darling? A variety of factors did. Here are all the reasons why Euphoria Season 3 is its most divisive season yet.

1 Euphoria Season 3 Came Four Years Later With Little Relevance

When Euphoria returned for the third season, the East Highland hallways were gone. Sam Levinson went for a five-year time jump in the story. He was probably left with no other choice, since the show’s third season arrived after a whopping four-year gap. The show was met with four years of production chaos, plagued with cast departures, two devastating off-screen losses, and reported troubles between cast & crew.

Even if Levinson had wanted to pick up where Season 2 left off, the calendar wouldn’t let him. Filming was originally meant to begin in early 2023, but several delays hit the production. By the time cameras finally rolled, nearly four years had passed since Season 2 had rolled out. It was roughly the time an actual American teenager spends in high school.

2 Season 3 from High School Drama to Western-Style Crime Thriller

After Season 2’s stage-play finale, it was clear that there was nowhere left to take these Euphoria characters inside a high school. Levinson even decided against a college setting for these characters. He made it seem like a creative choice during an interview last year, sharing, “The one thing we all agreed on is we can’t go back to high school” (via THR).

He further shared that “five years felt like a natural place [to jump] because if they had gone to college they’d be out of college at that time.” He even publicly announced that he was recalibrating the show’s tone toward “film noir” in the new season (via Elle). With two rival gangs, a DEA sting operation, Zendaya‘s Rue working as an informant, and the way the show wrapped things up, Levinson truly went for a Western Americana crime thriller in this third season.

Fans were truly disappointed as it had nothing to do with what the show’s earlier seasons were about. Many would have loved it if he truly showed the struggles in the transition from adolescence to adulthood for the characters. The earlier seasons dealt with themes of identity and trauma, which took a backseat this season.

3 The Cast Became Too Famous For Euphoria

By the time, Euphoria had returned for a third season, Zendaya, Sydney Sweeney, and Jacob Elordi had all aged into full-blown movie stars. Zendaya still had the Disney label on her when she joined the cast of this show. However, she went on to shape a career for herself, starring in Marvel’s Spider-Man movies, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movies, Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, and the recent flick with Robert Pattinson, The Drama.

Elordi’s flourishing movie career included critically acclaimed hits like Saltburn, Frankenstein, and Wuthering Heights, while Sweeney booked box office hits like Anyone but You and The Housemaid. All three actors have a booked schedule for the next couple of years. It meant that Levinson’s drama was no longer their priority.

For instance, Elordi’s scenes in the third season suggested that he might not have been available to shoot many combination scenes like in the previous seasons.

4 Season 3 Went Too Far With Sexualization of Female Characters

Of all the bad things people had to say about the new season, the character arcs of the female leads were the worst. Levinson progressively got bad in writing these female characters. His tone-deaf treatment of these young women in the third season feels like the show is parodying itself. What was once a show celebrated for its raw, empathetic portrayal of troubled teenage girls has devolved into a showcase of degradation and humiliation.

Levinson’s idea of evolution for these characters involved some variation of s*x work. Cassie’s OnlyFans arc sees her dressed as a dog on all fours, and later as an adult baby with a pacifier. She is outright humiliated on screen, and it’s very tough to watch. Zendaya’s Rue managed operations at Alamo’s strip club. Maddy is literally a Madame, which is a twisted representation of her newfound fierce independence from last season. And Jules is nothing more than a sugar baby.

Viewers are past seeing these tropes as edgy storytelling. It’s a failure of imagination from a writer who seems incapable of conceiving of womanhood outside of the “male gaze”.

5 Season 3 Neglected Some of Its Strongest Characters

There were many characters like Nate, Lexi, and Jules who were completely ignored for the large part of Season 3. The characters of Nate and Jules were central to both the previous seasons of the show. Lexi gained a largely significant role in the second season. However, third season gave them little to no character development. Lexi wasn’t crucial to any of the plot points.

Nate got married to Cassie in the third season, and he still continued to show his shades of toxicity. However, besides his irrelevant subplot with the villain investor Naz, there was nothing more written to the character. Moreover, the penultimate episode kills him off in the most brutal way.

Jules is perhaps the worst utilized character. She neither gets any interesting storylines nor gets a cool death. Despite Hunter Schafer being a great character, Jules just exists through the third season. Her story sees her drop out of art school to become a full time sugar baby, sponsored by wealthy men. Levinson truly failed these characters.

6 The Final Fate of Zendaya’s Rue Bennett Was Disappointing

Fans couldn’t believe that Sam Levinson still put Rue through a lot of suffering this season after what she had gone through in the last two seasons. Rue might be the most unlucky protagonist in TV history, as nothing seems to go right for her. In the final episode, we briefly believe that she might get her redemption arc after she works with DEA to take down Laurie.

However, a brutal fate awaited her after Alamo got the hint that she worked with the authorities. He uses her own weakness against her. He offers her a bottle of Percocet, a bag full of cash, and a week off from work. He tells her not to abuse it, clearly knowing that she would fall for the temptation.

It was just cruel for Levinson to kill off Rue by fentanyl poisoning. That too, in Ali’s apartment. The ending of Euphoria Season 3 reveal how Ali takes revenge against Alamo, essentially throwing away his life. No wonder, fans were upset with how Rue and Ali never got a break throughout the series.

7 Euphoria Appeared to Drift Away From Its Original Vision

Euphoria Season 2 ended with Lexi staging a play about the show inside the show. It was a meta finale that almost felt like Levinson waving from inside a hall of mirrors. It was clever, addressing the show’s surrealistic premise. But it was also a tell. When a writer turns the camera back on his own story, he’s usually approaching the end of his journey.

Even by Season 2, the high school setting that gave the show its close-quarters intensity in Season 1 began to feel like a cage. It was the beginning of the audience’s skepticism. How many more parking-lot fights, locker-room confessions, and bathroom breakdowns could Levinson write with these teenagers? The stage-play ending could’ve neatly wrapped up everything.

But wrapping the show wasn’t an option. Not for Levinson, and definitely not for HBO, who needed to squeeze more out of its most popular teen drama. And it resulted in a really bad outcome for HBO’s once-popular series.

What are your thoughts on Euphoria Season 3? Did the third season work for you? Do you agree with these issues? Let us know in the comments below!

All episodes of Euphoria are now available to stream on HBO Max.