Will we ever see a third season of Euphoria? Despite HBO’s insistence, it’s looking increasingly unlikely. The hit teen drama was originally set to begin filming some time in the spring, but the network announced this week that production had been pushed indefinitely. With Season 3 already delayed once and initially set to return in 2025—and the show notoriously taking several months to film, due to writer-director Sam Levinson’s chaotic filmmaking style—it’s hard to say whether it’ll make that target.
Levinson faces a series of challenges in starting things back up again. For one, it’s not like the cast has been sitting around since Season 2 wrapped in 2022, twiddling their thumbs. Zendaya has been walking red carpets around the world for two months straight; Jacob Elordi is working with Guillermo Del Toro; Hunter Schafer has a Yorgos Lanthimos film to promote; and Sydney Sweeney somehow gives us new reasons to talk about her on a weekly basis. Finding time to get the gang back together to pretend to be several years younger than they are—even with a proposed time jump—is looking harder and harder to do.
On top of that, Variety reported last week that the production has been all kinds of messy thus far. (Not shocking, if anyone’s been following anything Sam Levinson has done in the last five years.) So messy, in fact, that the entire season is being rewritten from the ground up. Part of that is due to some of the terrible ideas that Levinson and, frankly, Zendaya (sorry bae) have had thus far—like an older Rue working as a pregnancy surrogate (what) or gallivanting in the background as a private detective (well, okay, I’m actually kinda into that one). Does anyone know what this show is supposed to be anymore? I don’t even think the show does.
Sydney Sweeney, Alexa Demie, and Barbie Ferreira
HBOThat said, I’d argue that those of us who have stuck with this eternally doomed, kind-of-terrible show can generate some better episode pitches than what the creatives have so far. Below, The Daily Beast’s own begrudging and beleaguered Euphoria fans Laura Bradley, Coleman Spilde, and Allegra Frank pitch some of our own ideas for the show’s already cursed third season.
- Lexi (Maude Apatow) goes to the Yale School of Drama and immediately flunks out. —Allegra Frank
- Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) also forces her way into the Yale School of Drama to spite Lexi and, against all odds, becomes the star of the class. — Laura Bradley
- Jules (Hunter Schafer) finds out that she has a twin (special guest, TikTok star and model Alex Consani, who is frequently mistaken for Schafer online), and the two of them pitch a remake of Sister, Sister that is greenlit by Hollywood execs looking for trans representation, but deservedly lambasted online for being a whitewashed reimagining. —Coleman Spilde
- Elliot (Dominic Fike) embarks upon a tour after his first album of blandly forgettable acoustic ballads gains some traction. But he only achieves fame after a video of him falling asleep onstage during one of his first shows instantly goes viral. Was he too high, or was he even bored by his own music? Who can say. —AF
- Maddy (Alexa Demie) discovers therapy and immediately rebrands as a crunchy mental health influencer. —LB
Hunter Schafer and Zendaya
HBO- Nate (Jacob Elordi) forgets to duck in front of a low door frame, bonks his head, and loses his memory, only to wake up and become the school’s most congenial and beloved student. —CS
- In a crossover with Euphoria’s disastrous sister show, The Idol, Cassie becomes the PR rep for mega-pop star Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp). She accidentally creates major controversy after posting a candid of Jocelyn wearing a sweatshirt and knitting, killing her salacious image. —AF
- Rue (Zendaya) gets sober, except for Adderall, which she uses to study for the SATs and turn her life around, only to become hyper-focused on building a TikTok storefront selling merch tackily emblazoned with each of the 12 recovery steps in an ugly serif font. —CS
- Kat reunites with Ethan (Austin Abrams) and finally gets a decent story arc after Barbie Ferreira sues Sam Levinson for doing her character so dirty for two seasons. —LB
- Maddy doesn’t show up at school for days, only for her classmates to visit her at home and find out that she is binge-watching The Pioneer Woman. “There’s something really calming about this bitch,” she says, eating sour straws. —CS
Zendaya and Nika King
HBO- Sam Levinson takes ownership of his continuity error by introducing a third Jacobs brother, Tate Jacobs, who insists that he’s been
on the showfriends with the rest of the group this entire time. —AF
- Billie Eilish joins the cast as Shane, a social-media prophet who dresses in all white and wears a lot of face jewelry. Jules meets her in Bushwick and is instantly enamored, joining her doomsday cult and helping her recruit more “disciples” until the entire thing gets shut down by a New York Post exposé. —LB
- Cal (Eric Dane) asks his son, Nate, to visit him in “the big city,” where he is finally living openly as a gay man. Nate quickly realizes that Cal unironically calls his new partner his “husbear,” and Nate flees into the night, taking Cal’s credit card with him for a spending spree at Hudson News. —CS
- Rue’s sister Gia (Storm Reid) gets her own show-within-a-show, a la Skins Generation 2, in which she and her friends have comparatively mundane drama—like having the wrong opinion on BookTok and still wearing skinny jeans. —AF
- Five years from now, Rue is Meechee. —LB
