HBO’s “Euphoria” got a push last week rivaling any feature film.
The third and probably final season marked a huge return. Since Season 2, three of the actors — Zendaya, Jacob Elordi, and Sydney Sweeney — had become movie stars.
Elordi even had an Oscar nomination for “Frankenstein.”
So Sunday night’s debut seemed ripe for huge ratings, like “Game of Thrones.”
But only 356,000 linear viewers turned up on the HBO channel. The ratings were more anemic than some of the characters.
“Euphoria” boasts a younger audience, so HBO will say that a million or more saw the show on HBO Max, or are still seeing it now in delayed viewing. But the linear number is not so good.
It didn’t help that “Euphoria” season 3 was universally panned by critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, the average was just 44% among critics who’d seen it in advance. (I was not one one of them. HBO sent few screening links out, I guess.) The audience meter was just 50%.
So much for influencers who evidently did screen it in advance. They hated it. One said, “Virtually unwatchable. The story is unrealistic and unappealing. The characters are flat, one dimensional losers.’
Another said of director Sam Levinson: “[he]” clearly hated women. He killed two half naked women in the first episode, had two other women shoving their fingers down their throats and had the other making OF content pretending to be a dog. This season is so obviously him fulfilling his weird fetishes that he just wants to see the actresses degrade themselves with doing. It’s gross I won’t continue to watch.”
Another: “This is a testament to Zendaya’s greatness. She really is a beacon of talent in the middle of this sea of waste – of time, of money, of production, of fame.”
I’ll try and catch up with the first episode tonight. But this sounds like an idea that was envelope pushing during its time, and that time is over.
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