Before a single episode had aired, Euphoria Season 3 had already broken the internet — just not in the way anyone expected.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!The first wave of critic reviews landed Wednesday morning, and within hours, the fandom was in full meltdown. Four years of waiting. A confirmed finale season. A cast that had grown into some of the biggest names in Hollywood. And the early verdict? Critics are calling it the show’s worst season ever — and some of them are calling it considerably worse than that.
On X, two camps formed almost immediately. Defenders flooded replies insisting the press had completely missed the point. Skeptics piled on with receipts. Nobody in between managed to stay quiet.
Here’s what set it all off.
The Reviews Nobody Saw Coming
As of Thursday, Euphoria Season 3 sits at 50% on Rotten Tomatoes — its lowest score by a significant margin, down from roughly 80% for each of the first two seasons. Based on 20 published reviews from the industry’s biggest outlets, the picture that emerges is genuinely brutal in places.
The New York Post called it an “unhinged disaster.” IndieWire critic Ben Travers asked what may be the sharpest question of the entire review cycle: “How could Euphoria become boring?” The Wrap described a “redundant return.” The BBC concluded the show now has “very little to say, none of it very audacious or compelling.” Variety said the new season felt “random and ungrounded.”
That word — boring — was the one that detonated things online.
The structural issue most critics kept circling back to is the time jump. Creator Sam Levinson moved the story five years forward; the characters are now in their twenties, navigating lives that include strip clubs, OnlyFans careers, and in Rue’s case, drug smuggling across the Mexican border. What made the show’s extravagance feel urgent — the life-or-death stakes of adolescence, the way addiction hit differently at 17 — simply doesn’t land the same way on twenty-something characters, according to multiple reviews. The Hollywood Reporter put it plainly: things that felt “gloriously melodramatic” when the cast were teenagers “barely count as ideas when run through a 20-something prism.”
Not every outlet agreed. Decider called the first three episodes “a massive creative leap forward.” The Daily Beast said Euphoria is back and “somehow, better.” The divide on the critical side is real — this isn’t simply a fans-versus-press situation.
But at 50% on Rotten Tomatoes versus the ~80% both previous seasons held, the balance of critical opinion is difficult to argue around.
The One Name Both Sides Kept Saying
Here’s where it got complicated.
Despite everything — the wars in the comment sections, the competing review headlines, the “boring” discourse that swallowed the entertainment internet on Wednesday — one name appeared across every review regardless of whether it was positive or negative: Zendaya.
Critics who tore the season apart still described her performance as commanding. Critics who defended it said she was the primary reason the new direction worked at all. TV Guide, in a pointed review, wrote that she remains “Euphoria’s universe” — even as the show around her allegedly struggles to keep up. The consensus across every review was that she’s untouchable, regardless of what anyone thinks about everything else.
On X, the fan reaction to that specific point played out in real time. Clips from the Season 3 opening sequence spread quickly through the timeline Thursday — even among users openly admitting they were watching with lowered expectations. That combination of dread and loyalty is a specific kind of engagement that’s hard to manufacture, and it’s been building since Wednesday’s review drop.
Euphoria Season 3 premieres Sunday, April 12, on HBO and Max — confirmed as the final season by Levinson himself. Whether the audience receives it more warmly than the critics did, or walks away wondering why they waited four years, is the question nobody can answer before the weekend.
After all this time, people are going to watch regardless.
What they say after is the part that’s still unwritten.
