Zendaya and HBO both shot down Sam Levinson's Euphoria season 3 ideas

Things are not well in the world of HBO’s hit “teen” drama Euphoria, per a new report from Variety. The high school series, one of the semi-recent crown jewels of the network’s prestige TV offerings, hasn’t released new episodes since February 2022—a.k.a., enough time for even more of its less-young-by-the-minute leads to become massively huge stars, and for multiple people associated with the production to outright die, and for creator Sam Levinson to make a whole other TV show that was, by all accounts, a huge, expensive, and embarrassing mess. This week, HBO announced it was delaying the start of production on the show’s third season (while still reassuring audiences that said third season will be made), and now there’s this Variety report, which says that both HBO, and series star Zendaya, have expressed unhappiness with some of Levinson’s proposed story ideas for a third season, forcing him back to the drawing board multiple times as he works to find something that’ll make everybody happy (in a provocative, genre-defining TV sort of way).

According to the report, Levinson has largely worked out “compelling” arcs for Sydney Sweeney’s Cassie and Jacob Elordi’s Nate (fulfilling at least two-thirds of Euphoria’s “genuine movie stars now” quota). But he hasn’t been able to crack a plotline that everybody likes for Zendaya’s lead character Rue, having apparently pitched both HBO and Zendaya on arcs like “Maybe there’s a time jump and Rue is now a private detective?” which nobody apparently liked. (Variety is quick to note, by the way, that Zendaya has no official veto powers on the show’s scripts, all of which Levinson writes—but also notes that she and Levinson have always had a collaborative relationship that fueled Euphoria’s early success, so her buy-in is kind of essential.) At least some elements, suggested to include a Zendaya pitch where a now-sober Rue is a pregnancy surrogate, were reportedly rejected for “not feeling like the show”—a tricky prospect to deal with for a high-school-set series whose leads are now all in their mid-to-late 20s, and who are supposedly at least trying to mature as people.

Meanwhile, Euphoria has an enormous number of tensions hanging over its head: The 2023 death of star Angus Cloud, whose character Fez was central to some of Levinson’s early drafts for the third season; the death of long-time producer Kevin Turan, also in 2023, further slowing the creative process; the dismal production and reception of Levinson’s The Idol, which has apparently convinced HBO that they really need finished scripts from him before they send him off to start filming. And hanging over it all, the sheer, almost stultifying potential the series carries at this points: How many times has a network had a contract on its hand to make a new season of a highly successful TV show starring multiple highly bankable movie stars, all of whom, by all accounts, still actually want to make the show? And all of it is resting on Levinson’s would-be auteur shoulders: No wonder the cracks are starting to show.