Starring Zendaya and executively produced by Drake, HBO’s Euphoria premiered to a modest fanfare. By 2022, the show had become a cultural phenomenon, but not in the way its creator Sam Levinson likely intended.

The series’ ostensibly raw examination of addiction, mental illness, and teenage dysfunction in the opioid crisis era had the most unforgettable depiction of drug abuse I have ever seen. In the years Euphoria aired the United States was in the midst of its opioid crisis, premiering the same year that overdose deaths in the U.S. exceeded 70,000 annually. By 2021, when season two aired, that number had climbed to 106,000.

These are not abstract statistics. They represent thousands of families living through something not dissimilar to what the Bennett family lives through on screen. However, the general cultural discussion was not on the stellar performances in the show – the series has been transformed into something else entirely: a mood board.

Glittery eye makeup inspired by Rue’s drug-fuelled nights flooded Instagram. TikTok users set clips of characters’ most devastating moments to hyperpop soundtracks and dubbed them “relatable vibes.” The show’s unflinching portrayal of a sixteen-year-old girl’s heroin addiction became, paradoxically, aspirational. 

This transformation reveals something unsettling about how contemporary audiences engage with serious art.

The pain and art of the show lost meaning. Euphoria didn’t accidentally become the poster child for this phenomenon. Rather, it illustrates a collision between artistic intent, platform mechanics, and generational viewing practices that has fundamentally altered how we read television in the streaming age.

We must first acknowledge that Euphoria makes its own seduction possible. Levinson’s direction is undeniably beautiful—perhaps problematically so. Euphoria’s approach to depicting teenage sexuality compounds the aestheticization problem. The show contains explicit nudity—both male and female, scenes that are often framed as moments of vulnerability rather than titillation. A character undressing in front of a mirror, a sexual encounter that goes wrong, a moment of physical exposure tied to emotional exposure: Levinson frames these as necessary to depicting how teenagers experience their bodies and sexuality.

And there’s something true in this. High schoolers do navigate sex and relationships in ways that previous generations did not, with more pressure, more documentation, more complexity. But the show’s commitment to explicit this depiction creates an uncomfortable proximity between artistic documentation and something closer to misdirection. 

When Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) has a sexual breakdown and appears fully nude, the show is theoretically exploring her psychological disintegration. The nudity, meant to convey vulnerability – a moment meant to show the raw character’s suffering – would be extracted and recirculated,  becoming another aesthetic commodity. Moreover, the show’s depiction of teenage relationships presents dysfunction as inevitable rather than tragic. This is perhaps the most honest thing about the show, but it’s also the most dangerous when mediated through social platforms where aesthetics are divorced from consequence. The show doesn’t glamorize these relationships, exactly, but its visual and narrative commitment to depicting them in granular, almost creates a kind of fascination that can read, to viewers seeking validation for their own messy connections, as something like ethnographic documentation—which normalizes what it depicted as the audience can find something to relate to. 

When Euphoria exploded on social media, particularly among Gen Z viewers, something predictable happened: the most visually striking elements were extracted and recirculated, divorced from their narrative context. The makeup, those elaborate, glittering eye designs with tiny rhinestones and gradient-blown eyeshadow became a trend. Beauty YouTubers created tutorials. Urban Outfitters sold Euphoria-inspired makeup palettes. This wasn’t the first time a show’s aesthetic had been commodified, but the speed and scale were remarkable. More remarkably, TikTok accelerated this process exponentially. The platform’s short and snappy extracted key moments from the TV show’s narrative. A 15-second clip of Rue’s hands shaking as she withdraws from drugs, scored to a melancholic indie song, travels faster and reaches more people than the full scene with its surrounding emotional architecture. The clip feels true about addiction in a way that mirrors how the person posting it experiences their own pain. Context collapses. The scene becomes a mirror rather than a window. 

In 2020, the show released a Rue focused special episode that functioned as a kind of existential reckoning. Confined to a single location (a diner), Rue and Leslie sit across from each other and excavate the roots of her addiction: her father’s death from cancer, her early use of drugs as grief management, the way her addiction has metastasized from coping mechanism to identity. The episode is almost entirely dialogue, stripped of the visual excess that usually accompanies Euphoria. It’s the show at its most rhetorically honest: addiction is not transcendent or beautiful. It is the catastrophic failure of every system meant to protect you. 

Yet this episode, while acclaimed, generated fewer TikToks than the glittery makeup tutorials. 

Season 2 doubled down on the show’s commitment to depicting addiction as unmitigated disaster. Rue’s relapse sequence set largely in a single night is the show’s longest, most brutal depiction of substance abuse. She is not glamorous. She is paranoid, violently ill, prone to hallucination. She steals from her friend Lexi (Maude Apatow). She is confronted with the reality that she has become someone others are afraid of. The season ends with her father figure, Leslie, literally dragging her through the streets toward recovery. These sequences are designed to repel, not attract. And yet, they were among the most widely circulated on social media. A work enters the world and begins a new life there, subject to forces and ideas its creator cannot contain. 

Euphoria is neither failed nor successful—it’s both, simultaneously. A work can be masterful and enable its own misreading. This isn’t a flaw but the condition of art in 2025: meaning collapses under algorithmic pressure. We need not blame creators or fans but rather interrogate how platforms transform painful discussions into aesthetics, and how genuine suffering becomes style. 

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons