In its first season, “Euphoria” was a lightning bolt.
The HBO series, crackling with strangeness and possibility, generated noise and light in a way that seemed new and backward. The show told stories about the TikTok generation with all the emotional excess that comes with being a teenager. And in Zendaya and Hunter Schafer, he presented two extremely charismatic and talented performers – the first a familiar face that allowed him to graduate to a new level of performance, the second a new star. The TV scene has gotten a little darker without them since the first season of “Euphoria” ended in August 2019.
Evidently, series creator Sam Levinson missed these actors and their characters as well. This weekend sees the launch of the second of two off-season specials on HBO, after a preview on HBO Max. The first of them dealt with Rue (Zendaya), an addict trying to recover, meeting her godfather after her relapse and discussing what is to come. The new one shifts the focus to Jules (Schafer) in a therapy session reflecting on the events of the recent past.
This difference is part of the reason why the first special “Euphoria” was a qualified success and the new one, entitled “Fuck Anyone Who Is Not a Sea Blob”, unfortunately it is not. This episode spends a lot of time rebuilding a familiar plot, going through old stories with a degree of style and talent that seems applied to hide that there is not much news here. A sequence at the beginning of the episode is revealing. We see a close-up of Schafer’s eye as Jules looks through old images of his relationship with Rue; they are reflected in his iris, alternating quickly, while Lorde’s harrowing and emotionally broad anthem “Liability” plays almost entirely.
Sad things are sad, and that is also sad. But it’s an easy abbreviation for a big emotional catharsis – pairing an easy recap of past events with a melodramatic style and a song from the album “Melodrama” – which seems to fall short of what Levinson, as a director, has shown himself capable of achieving. He is preparing for an episode without enough on his mind to justify joining the band again.
That this ends up out of reach seems impossible elsewhere in the episode. A lot of time, for example, is spent in a therapy session between Jules and a character played by Lauren Weedman. There, Jules brings up, and sometimes turns away from, big and important concepts in his mind, including flirting with the idea of stopping hormone replacement therapy as a way to potentially move away from a version of himself which she now sees as built for male pleasure. This raises, frankly, questions that a potential second season can answer well, and Schafer is excellent in every respect. (Therapy scenes are not easy, and Jules’ shyness, challenge, and exploration of possibilities sparkle in Schafer in an intriguing counterpoint.)
But Levinson’s direction tends to leave the script, of Levinson and Schafer together, down. Rue’s special, “Trouble Don’t Last Always”, was rooted in a single conversation and was even more effective for that. Here, instead, cuts to flashbacks diminish what is happening in the room, while explaining too much and trying to position this excessive explanation as something more artistic. Flashbacks are filmed in such an artistic way that it obscures what they are portraying for a few seconds. When Jules talks to his father about his mother’s sad case (a recovering addict like Rue), the music is so dominant in the mix that it’s hard to understand what Jules is saying – a victory of humor over meaning.
What was charming about a full season of the program, where the information was sparingly distributed over time, becomes excruciating in an hour-long session that clearly wants to get somewhere, but is very hesitant to get there. The revelation, for example, that Jules is still in love with a fake Internet account is diminished by the endless photos of her sex fantasies in the real world with a man who never existed. It is a crystalline detail of the character, amid many recounts of the first season, which Levinson ends up sensationalizing beyond the point of view; we lost Jules in favor of an exclamation point. As a subject of therapy, Jules is evasive. But it would have been possible for this episode to focus on mirroring that trait without doing much to keep us apart.
This is disappointing. Schafer is a natural performer whose point of view on Jules, throughout “Euphoria”, seemed to guide the character. (No wonder, after all, she ended up as a co-writer here.) But she, like Jules, seems lost even within this supposed showcase episode. The episode that opens with her watery eyes ends in a moment of catharsis (the momentum I will not spoil) in Jules’ room. She is crying for what she lost and what is to come. Having taken his actor to this point, Levinson throws her through a rain-streaked window and begins a long zoom out, obscuring Schafer, silencing her and reducing her to a small portion of the scene. It is a moment whose emphasis on talent over the most interesting things happening on the board does not say anything good about a show where greatness has always been the point. The personal and the real – the things that great actors bring – ultimately cannot compete with a TV episode that is passionate about the idea of itself.
“Fuck Anyone Who’s Not a Sea Blob” will air on January 24 at 9:00 pm ET