In the first 30 minutes of the new season of Euphoria, which premiered last night, we see the following: women choking as they attempt to swallow lubed-up balls of fentanyl they’re attempting to smuggle across the border from Mexico; women preparing to shit out those balls into colanders once they get to the other side; women with shit trickling down their legs when they don’t make it to those colanders in time; and then, as if this wasn’t enough, a dog licking the shit off their legs (was that really necessary?).

The show’s creator Sam Levinson has faced numerous accusations of misogyny and mistreatment of women. Four Euphoria actors – Sydney Sweeney, Chloe Cherry, Martha Kelly and Minka Kelly – have reportedly asked him to cut nude scenes from the show, with descriptions of those scenes ranging from “unnecessary” (Sweeney) to having a “gross paedophilia vibe” (Martha Kelly). His other series, The Idol, faced similar criticisms, drawing comparisons to “torture porn” and “rape fantasy”. And with the new season of Euphoria, Levinson does nothing to assuage these accusations. In fact, he appears to double down.

We see a woman collapse and die of an overdose in an airport after one of those fentanyl balls bursts inside her body, followed by a shot of the remaining balls being sprayed clean of her blood and prepared for distribution. Later on, we see another woman (also young, also dressed in clothes that sexualise her) collapse and choke on her own, frothing yellow bile on a bathroom floor. These gratuitous scenes of drug misuse are hard to digest and even harder when you consider the fate of Angus Cloud – a star of the previous seasons – who died in 2023 from a lethal overdose of methamphetamine, cocaine, fentanyl and benzodiazepines.

Elsewhere, we see Sweeney’s character, Cassie, dressed up as an infantile dog for Instagram, complete with a collar and lead, only to be shamed as a “prostitute” by Jacob Elordi’s Nate in the next frame, and dragged by the lead towards him in the next. “You’ve been a bad, bad dog,” he says.

Sex work is a theme in almost every plot line: Hunter Schafer’s character Jules is now a sugar baby, which Alexa Demie’s Maddie says is tantamount to being a “hooker”; Cassie is toying with the idea of becoming an OnlyFans performer; Rue meets a pimp who calls himself “the king of pussy” and considers becoming a pimp herself.

That’s not to mention all the sex workers who appear in scenes in Tijuana, in a strip club, a sex club. These scenes seem to relish in the dehumanising potential of sex work – and it’s not shot from the position of the sex workers but from the men who are employing (and enjoying) them. The sex workers are not humanised or empathised with; we don’t hear their stories and understand their motivations. They just serve as props – not even plot devices that aid the narrative of the episode in any way, just as props, aimed only at adding aesthetic appeal and perverse provocation to the show. 

Responding to criticisms about the ways he portrays sex in 2023, he said, “We live in a very sexualised world. Especially in the States, the influence of pornography is strong in the psyche of young people. We see this in pop music.” But his work doesn’t critique this; it reflects it, revels in it.

But there’s another scene that reveals Levinson’s misogyny in sharpest relief. Maud Apatow’s character Lexi is now working in Hollywood and is seen in a writing room, filled with women and queer people (one, pointedly, with dyed blue hair). The scene seems to mock the group – and by extension, women or “woke people” in Hollywood – without offering anything close to comment, let alone comedy. The implication is simply that they are silly and sanctimonious.

I’m not sure if Levinson is aware of his own desire to see women so abjectly degraded in his work – but for us viewers, it’s abundantly clear. The whole thing is gross – as hard to stomach as those lubed-up fentanyl balls.