Season 2 of HBO’s Euphoria is finally complete — landing with a gun battle, multiple plot lines ending in arrest, and the final act of what might be the best high school play ever performed in the greater East Highland area.

Euphoria is essentially a Gen Z update to its teen melodrama predecessors like Degrassi and Dawson’s Creek. (In fact, Degrassi alumnus Drake produces Euphoria, a US adaptation of an Isreali show.) Like those shows, Euphoria is led by a large cast of actors (clearly in their mid-20s) playing high schoolers who get themselves into every conceivable nightmare scenario that keeps parents awake at all hours.

This updated spin on the proven formula includes an over-saturated budget that allows excesses in every direction, and that really is the charm of the show. Everything is in excess: the makeup, the sexual content, the danger, the drugs, the fights, the tears, the angst.

But it also does something better than just about any other show going right now — it gives you an experience that feels good to watch. For all of its flaws, in the pursuit of aesthetics over depth, it has achieved this aim. True to the promise of its name, Euphoria is the TV programming equivalent of oxycodone.

How to Make a Show Feel Good

Euphoria uses turbo-charged cinema that never confuses us but never lets us tune out. It’s an intense and demanding experience, one that is its own payoff.

The filmmaking, especially in Season 1, goes hard. Think Scorsese at his most self indulgent — the show has even referenced Casino, no doubt a nod to the stylistic influence that film has made on the creators. Euphoria makes full use of the same bag of tricks, including extensive exposition, slow motion pop music montages, abuse of bokeh, expressive leaps into the surreal, and cuts hidden with elaborate, sweeping camera movement through large sets.

But there is also something reminiscent of Atom Egoyan films in the storytelling. There is a focus on the pathos of obsession: be it with drugs, sex, or violence. That simmering psychological drive allows for intrigues built around some of the most captivating elements of the human experience — leading to the stuff that the juiciest gossip is made of. 

And while this style and pathos is wrapped up in A24’s sheen (that’s become the most coveted cinematic look in the past handful of years), it is all kept together and moving forward with an emphasis on scenes.

What Euphoria might appear to lack in grounded substance, it makes up for with scenes that — if not inspired by the muses — are incredibly well made.

The Well-Made Scene

In “Shook Ones Pt. II” (Season 1, Episode 4), Nate Jacobs (the tyrant king jock, played by Jacob Elordi) reveals to a vulnerable Jules Vaughn (an outsider transgender girl, played by Hunter Schafer) that he has catfished her on a dating app. In the weeks leading up to their meeting, the two have giddily exchanged loving text messages. But now that Nate’s identity is revealed, Jules is hurt. Other complicating factors aside, the scene unfolds with a back and forth battle of motivations inside each character and between them. 

Nate is trying to blackmail Jules, but he has also actually fallen in love with her. Jules is emotionally shredded by the revelation, but is still having trouble shaking off the crush she had for what turns out to be a cruel bully.

There is a push and pull in this scene that builds to a breaking point, when Nate is driven — as his character often is — to an act of violence.

Yes, yes — it is melodrama. And yes, the full backstory to their encounter would require a wall of text explicating a web of improbable scandal and dark secrets that seem lab created for shock value. But those aren’t really negatives. They are features, because all of this top shelf gossip is described to us through dreamy, candy colored exposition and scenes that keep the characters interesting, alive, and liable to do something that we can’t predict. And yet once we see those unpredictable decisions, it feels true almost all of the time.

This heady mix of high octane aesthetics and powerful dramatic craftsmanship taps along to a tightly paced beat. The effect? Well, it’s euphoric.

What a Feeling Means: Why Typical Film Analysis Fails Euphoria

But it is here that a typical film analysis of Euphoria would ask those big, standard questions — the kind that middle-brow viewers always need answered before they can allow themselves to like a work of art. What does it mean? Why is it so popular? What does it say about our culture?

These questions miss what the show is doing so well. They get you further away from understanding it, not closer.

Just as Zendaya’s character Rue is compelled to run headfirst into her next high, the viewer chases down that next episode. On Sunday evenings before 9 o’clock (when the show drops on HBO Max), the viewer is forced to tap their toe and check the time over and over, as if waiting for a call from their dealer.

In other words, the show isn’t really “about” something in an intellectual sense. It is an aesthetic pursuit to create a certain experience. It’s a vibe, not an idea, that the creators are trying to express.

One can sift through all the salacious B and C plots, the sometimes depraved character transformations, and the decidedly HBO-ified levels of nudity and adult themes. But at the end of all this, you’ll only miss the forest for the trees.

The Art of the Fleeting High 

Euphoria revels in the dark side of teenage drug abuse, graphic sex in the age of porn, and the disturbing consequences of placing smartphones in the hands of children. But it doesn’t really say anything about this. Instead, it uses these things to engender the same sort of rush that gets us addicted to all sorts of behavior.

Really, that’s a much more interesting project. The form and content are perfectly matched. It might not teach us something we didn’t already know about the false god of addiction, but it replicates the seductive yet vacant pleasures that lead to it.

For some reason, this kind of aesthetic-over-meaning approach is often read as shallow. And from a certain perspective, Euphoria is very, very shallow. But, again, the actual feeling of euphoria is shallow. That’s why it is so fleeting — it doesn’t leave you with anything except its absence. We chase after it because we gain nothing from it beyond the sensation itself. Remember, euphoria is only valuable when you are feeling it. The memory of yesterday’s high brings no joy today. Tomorrow’s high is only experienced as frustration at the slow passing of time.

We love euphoria, not because it has meaning, but because it has no meaning.

In the same way, the show Euphoria might not really say anything about our society, it might not have insights that you can take with you, but it feels really, really good to watch.