For the past seven years, HBO’s Zillenial high school drama series has been one of, if not the most, polarizing shows on television. Since 2019, Sam Levinson’s “Euphoria” has provoked, vexed and offended its viewer base with almost every episode. Through all of it: the violent depictions of sexual violence, the fetishistic costume designs, the ridiculous plot turns, and worst of all, the Dominic Fike guitar songs, Levinson has tested the very meddle of the show’s core audience. 

Implicitly asking episode by episode, “Are you sure you want to keep watching this?” And while most “fans” of the show seem to want to be set free from this almost decade-long abusive relationship, they just can’t seem to look away from the fiery ruins of a once groundbreaking show. 

To me, the recent outcry over some of the more (let’s just say) provocative material present in the show’s newest season is indicative of a larger generational issue. This is not in any way exempting this terrible show from narrative criticism. Sam Levinson is a Zionist hack with a plethora of revolting fetishes that he exploits in some disgusting ways on screen and should absolutely be lambasted for any number of reasons. 

What I’m noticing recently, however, pertains not as much to the actual thematic material of season three, but rather the way it’s being depicted. I feel this stems from the most vocal viewer base of the show (gen-Z/millenial) and their inability to critically engage with fictional television as a medium. 

Since most of our upbringings were shaped far more by media that we’ll call “real enough” in Youtube vlogs, short form content and reality television or internet content and less so by mediums that are more intrinsically rooted in fantasy or fiction like books, films or television, the way we mediate fictional content, especially more titillating fictional content that tends to mirror reality, tends to obfuscate and confuse our lens of perception.

In the case of the YouTube vlog, we instinctively understand that these are real people in real scenarios. The persona may be hemmed up for the camera, and some of the occurrences may be premeditated or planned, but ultimately, this content is “real enough.” The people are real, and the world around them is, in fact, our own. So when someone like Logan Paul films himself surrounded by hanging carcasses in the Japanese Suicide forest, the ethos of the character is rightfully criticized. That was a bad thing that he did, and we should be mad at him. Now let’s take a show like “Euphoria,” one that is not only complacent with the grimy moralities of the main cast, but chooses to lie with them in the muck. 

A character like Nate, a stereotypical jock with sexually violent tendencies, is resented by the show’s fanbase and rightfully so; he is frequently abusive and violent in his sexuality to protect his own homosexual desires. Such a character is emblematic of the hypermasculine mask that has defined American machismo since the inception of the word.  

In season three, he has inherited his late father’s business, is in $550,000 of debt and currently planning to marry Cassie, who is about to start an OnlyFans to finance her dream wedding. If this current iteration of American masculinity wasn’t obvious enough, maybe the Cybertruck that he drives now should be a good indication that the show has pivoted from coming-of-age tragedy to biting Neo-American satire. 

Yet the viewer base, in many ways, still seems to be stuck in high school, attempting to live vicariously through these characters the same way they would through a YouTube vlog. The show has been full of gratuitous depictions of violence, sexuality and drug use since the very first episode, and still, after a teaser for this week’s upcoming episode hit Twitter, recurring fans are beside themselves that this episode might contain upsetting imagery. 

Fortunately for them, the show is fiction, and the events and characters that it contains are also fiction. Season after season, for seven years now, the audience bemoans the brutal subject matter of a show that mirrors our contemporary life, but will still tune in every Sunday, desensitized to the real world around them and hypersensitive to the fictional one.