'Almost rage bait': Has Euphoria gone from defining Gen Z to dividing them?

Warning: This article contains spoilers for season three of Euphoria

Rue is swallowing balls of drugs and smuggling them between America and Mexico. Cassie is making erotic content on OnlyFans to pay for wedding flowers. Nate is losing fingers and toes in blood-soaked revenge scenes and Jules is giving up her artistic career to search for a sugar daddy.

If Euphoria once felt like an exaggerated but emotionally resonant portrait of Gen Z adolescence, its latest season has pushed that chaos to near-surreal extremes.

And after seven weeks polarising both critics and social media, the series concludes on Monday. Some viewers speculate this will be a relief to its central cast, who they say have "outgrown" the show. In fact, many fans, teens when the show launched in 2019, say they too are ready to move on.

Zendaya, Sydney Sweeney and Jacob Elordi, all now major names, star as a group of young people navigating sex, drug addiction, friendship, love and trauma. Season three picks up half a decade after the characters left high school, following them into a far darker and more fractured version of adulthood.

When Euphoria first launched, it quickly became one of the defining shows of its generation, but after a five-year break marked by strikes, rewrites and cast departures, it returned to a noticeably more divided response.

In December, ahead of the season three launch, showrunner Sam Levinson said "this is our best season yet". The response from critics may not have borne that out (it has a weighted average of 56% on review aggregation site Metacritic), but so far, viewing figures are the show's highest ever.

The first episode drew a US audience of more than 12.3 million, while global viewership surpassed 20 million - a 68% increase on the season two premiere over the same period, according to Warner Bros. Discovery.

Euphoria has always thrived on viral moments, but some viewers believe certain scenes in season three have been concocted specifically with memes and social media in mind - at the expense of character and plot.

Weeks after the relevant episodes aired, my own feeds are still flooded with edits and jokes about Cassie dressing up as a baby, and Nate telling her "you've been a bad, bad dog".

Journalist and........

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