Euphoria Is No Longer the Anointed One

Amid a poorly received third season, the HBO drama’s Emmy hopes stand on shakier ground than Nate and Cassie’s marriage. Photo: Eddy Chen/HBO

Nearly four years ago, Zendaya took the stage at the 2022 Emmy Awards to accept her second Outstanding Actress in a Drama trophy for Euphoria. It was the capper to a tremendous Emmys for Sam Levinson’s harrowing and absurd teen drama, which plunged its characters deeper into the realms of drug addiction, violence, and high-school theater. The season claimed 16 total nominations, including placement in the Outstanding Drama Series category, and five wins at the Creative Arts Emmys. It was the second-most-nominated drama series (after Succession) and had more total wins than any show besides The White Lotus. By any interpretation, Euphoria had established itself as one of HBO’s top-performing awards contenders. So when the series began its long-awaited third season this spring, it was totally reasonable to consider it a lock for multiple statues come September.

Then the episodes started airing. “A shadow of its former self,” said The Atlantic; “fanfiction of itself,” agreed Variety. Time’s review noted that “each storyline comes slathered in the tropes of its own familiar genre.” My colleague Roxana Hadadi called the new season “as beautifully lit as it is emotionally hollow.” The Emmys are not the most reactive awards body on earth — it can take several years before voters stop nominating shows that have long since lost their potency among fans and critics (see This Is Us and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, both nominated through their fifth seasons) — but Euphoria’s third season just might be disappointing enough to deflate everything the show has going for it as a major contender.

Since its beginning, Euphoria has been one of the buzziest shows on TV. Its first season scandalized with sex and drugs and dick-pic seminars, but it also drew a ton of praise. The show ended up on “Best of 2019” lists from Vogue, Esquire (which called it “the best look at the generation born after 9/11 we’ve seen on TV yet”), GQ (which predicted that Zendaya would EGOT one day), and right here at Vulture. Even as Levinson came under increasing fire in 2022 for allegedly unsafe and/or creepy filming conditions, the ratings remained strong. By the end of its second season, Euphoria was HBO’s second-most-watched show since 2004, behind Game of Thrones.

What’s striking about the reception to Euphoria’s third season — and what might be most damaging to its Emmy chances — is not just that the new episodes have been subpar television; it’s that the show no longer resembles its former self. After a five-year time jump, Rue (Zendaya) is a drug mule hauling fentanyl across the Mexican border, Jules (Hunter Schafer) is sugar-babying out in the big city, Lexi (Maude Apatow) and Maddy (Alexa Demie) are hustling in the entertainment industry, and Nate (Elordi) and Cassie (Sweeney) are preparing for a blockbuster bad-idea wedding. “I’m not sure who these characters are in season three, because the show isn’t treating them as characters anymore,” Hadadi tells me. “Everyone now is an avatar for a big idea — the danger of fentanyl, the crassness of the super-wealthy, the allure of sex work, the evils of the American dream. Levinson has turned these characters into gargantuan concepts that he thinks he’s handling with nuance and singularity. He isn’t.”

This kind of criticism, where a once-popular show seems to have lost its identity, is reminiscent of other series’ steep Emmy falloffs. Desperate Housewives went from 15 Emmy nominations (including three for Lead Actress in a Comedy) in 2005 to six nominations (and none for its lead actresses) for a sophomore season that fumbled the introduction of a new family to the cast. In 2015, True Detective’s sensational first season was followed by a critically derided second effort that was all but blanked by the Emmy voters.

But the awards case for Euphoria was always as much about what the show represented off-screen as it was about what happened on it. Euphoria was the “it’s not TV, it’s HBO” version of the teen drama, with all the sex and drugs and moral depravity viewers have come to expect from Home Box Office. In Levinson’s version of the high-school experience, the kids were addicted to drugs and doing sex work. The second-season finale jumped back and forth between the school play and two major characters getting gunned down by the Feds. The ascent of Sydney Sweeney and Jacob Elordi into bona fide movie stars and Oscar red-carpet fixtures over the last five years has only added to Euphoria’s reputation as prestige TV’s youth whisperer.

The industry has faced threats to its own identity in the four years since Euphoria’s season two aired. The WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes were followed by a decrease in the number of overall productions. The SoCal wildfires scarred both the landscape and psyches in Los Angeles. Warner Bros. — HBO included — was sold to Larry Ellison’s kid. AI looms as an immediate threat to industry creatives. Overall, the existential terror in Hollywood is exponentially higher. In some ways, Euphoria represents the “how we got into this mess” version of the TV business: a one-man-band auteurist show where Levinson has written every episode and directed all but two. No writers’ room, long stretches between seasons, a production fraught with delays. In 2022, this was fodder for articles or Twitter threads, but in 2026, it’s a reason for Emmy voters to hate you. As one voter who works in reality TV put it to me, Euphoria hasn’t been good enough in its third season to get voters to overrule those qualms. “All the buzz has led to ratings that seem totally fine. But I’m not sure anything about this season has given voters the permission to elevate it to a real contender.”

Meanwhile, a huge part of The Pitt’s winning Emmy narrative last year was about the return of longer seasons (15 episodes!) and an L.A.-based production that provided the kind of steady employment rarely seen in the TV business these days. That appeal is just as strong this year, and it’s a major indicator that The Pitt is still the overwhelming front-runner for the drama Emmys. “The Pitt is still in the best interests of this business,” says one TV writer who has worked on network dramas. “Everyone is watching it. They’re making lots of episodes of it. It’s John Wells. It is clear that [Emmy voters] see this show as we might be able to get back to TV.”

The acting categories are a bit more open, and that’s where Euphoria retains its most notable advantage. There’s every chance the TV Academy will still be as dazzled by Zendaya as it was when it gave her Lead Actress in a Drama trophies in 2020 and 2022. Her biggest competition appears to be Pluribus’s Rhea Seehorn and The Diplomat’s Keri Russell. Seehorn won at both the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards earlier this year, while Russell is poised to earn her sixth nomination in the category (including three nominations for The Americans). The only other woman with six or more nominations in Lead Actress in a Drama and zero wins is the late Angela Lansbury, who famously never won for any of her 12 nominations. (I can’t decide whether Netflix’s awards-publicity team should be shouting this incredible statistic from the rooftops or treat it like an old European curse and never speak it into existence again.)

In the five years since Euphoria filmed its second season, Zendaya, Sweeney, and Elordi have combined for $4.49 billion in worldwide box office. Yes, that’s mostly Zendaya (the Dune and Spider-Man movies count for a lot), but Elordi (with Wuthering Heights’s $242 million gross) and Sweeney (with $401 million for The Housemaid) are both coming off of their biggest hits to date. Elordi is also an Oscar nominee as of earlier this year, Zendaya has three major tentpole movies releasing between now and the end of 2026, and Sweeney will probably film an advertisement that will sway the next presidential election. The star power is significant, and the voters may want in on that action. “I imagine it will surprise you not at all that this is a town of starfuckers,” the same TV writer told us. “If you’re cool, this is a town chasing cool.”

Adventures in Hyperlocalized Emmy Campaigning

While the bulk of Emmy hobnobbing happens in Los Angeles and New York, local displays of appreciation can be good campaign fodder as well. (Yes, for the sake of keeping this blurb cohesive, I’m counting zillennial-hosted podcasts as local to the base of support for Industry. Just go with it.)

This week, the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball club announced a Dr. Robby bobblehead giveaway day for later this summer, when the first 20,000 fans inside the gates will receive a commemorative bobblehead of Noah Wyle’s Emmy-winning character from The Pitt. The giveaway won’t be until the Pirates game on July 25, so you have time to make plans for a pilgrimage, and will be part of “Yinzerpalooza,” the annual celebration of all things Pittsburgh held at the Pirates’ home stadium. The figurine features Robby decked out in his trademark scrubs, hoodie, stethoscope, and expression of withering contempt for Dr. Samira Mohan, which in full bobble truly resembles the man at his most self-righteous.

Elsewhere, the state of Illinois recognized the Italian beef sandwich as its official state sandwich and had The Bear star Corey Hendrix (who plays sommelier Sweeps) on hand for the ceremony. The official resolution, which passed unanimously on May 20, declared May 23, 2026, as “Italian Beef Day” in Illinois. After commending the proud beef sandwich as a symbol of Illinois’s culinary heritage and immigrant history, the resolution went on to extend “sincere congratulations and gratitude to the creators, cast, and crew of The Bear for their extraordinary portrayal of Chicago’s Italian beef culture, for shining a national and international spotlight on the State of Illinois, and for inspiring pride in the State’s rich culinary and cultural identity.” My instinct was to snark at The Bear for getting Emmy-season publicity via its 12th lead showing up for a beef-sandwich commemoration in Springfield, but that resolution won me over.

Finally, Industry Emmy hopeful Myha’la did the girls-gays-and-theys equivalent of attending a beef-sandwich commemoration ceremony and guested on Jake Shane’s Therapuss podcast. She was, of course, deeply charming, and the pair gabbed about New York summers and their respective Saturn returns, but if I’m someone invested in Industry finally making long-awaited headway into the Emmy races, I’m concerned that Myha’la isn’t reaching the audience she needs. Industry already has the permanently online, can’t-sit-in-chairs-normally vote locked down. It’s time to pivot toward Hot Ones, Good Hang, and audiences who don’t know who Tate McRae is.