Rise and fall stories are very popular. Probably because they tell the kind of story that is known to end badly: someone flies too close to the sun and ends up getting burned. It is interesting to see what precipitates that failure. And few rise and fall stories on television are like those of Euphoria. The biggest television series in recent years whose third season is an absolute failure. But it was easy to foresee that this was going to happen. Because all the signs were there since its second season.
A series that knew better times
It hasn’t always been this way. If there is one thing to recognize, it is that there was a time when Euphoria was everything. It dominated conversations on social media, constant edits were made, and even critics seemed delighted with the series. Even if its representation of adolescence has always been exaggerated, it was appealing and interesting due to some great performances and a visual care that kept both the audience and critics engaged. The characters mattered. It was easy to empathize with them. And it was visually appealing. It was easy to get hooked.
What happened for it to stop working? The most obvious thing is that the series began to lose some of its appeal over time. This was noted by critics when comparing the first and second seasons. In the first season, the performances, visual aspect, and stories were highlighted, while in the second season, only the first two aspects were emphasized. And in the third season, it has only gotten worse.
The plots of the third season are absurd and seem to go nowhere. Often, they don’t even seem to have any purpose beyond offending or seeking some kind of impact on the viewers. Something they have occasionally achieved. But always at the cost of something important: their characters.
The biggest complaint about this third season, criticized by both critics and the public alike, is that it is not the same. And that’s normal. The stories, vaguely coherent, do not allow actors to develop their characters in interesting and emotionally impactful ways as before, making them much less impactful. And due to the loss of interest in the visual, the series no longer generates the same interest.
The problem of not knowing when to let go
But there is another problem worth noting that is very important for a series like Euphoria: a lot of time has passed between seasons. Almost three years passed between the first and second seasons. More than four years have passed between the second and third. That makes more than seven years for three seasons in what is definitely a series with a clear target audience: people between 18 and 25 years old. In the time that has passed in the production of three seasons, someone who was at the lower end of its target audience has already aged out of it.
This is a problem. And it is because people grow, mature, their tastes change. Perhaps this third season, as it is, would have worked just as well four years ago. But not now. Not especially when it is accompanied by huge controversies with some members of its cast and with others who have an image completely detached from what they do in the series, due to how their careers have evolved. Because making a season a year is not a whim: it is a necessity to not lose the target audience or for your own actors to stop being attractive to it.
Productions that are stretched out over time like those of Euphoria make no sense. Even less so in a series whose target audience is young, and so young that three seasons in seven years literally means a third of their life. And that is the problem with the series: they have not known how to capitalize on its success or let it go.
Euphoria could have worked with five seasons in five years or by accepting that a third season after seven years made no sense. But either they haven’t known how to let it go or they haven’t known how to speed up the production of the series, causing it to become a failure. Because the audience no longer exists. Because they no longer know how to make a good season of Euphoria. Can they save the series in a hypothetical fourth season? Not if it takes another four years to release it. And given their track record, it’s doubtful that will happen.
