Sam Levinson makes television that looks like nothing else on it, and then explains it to you in voiceover. The pictures, shot with Marcell Rév, are the real thing; the writing keeps mistaking shock for insight, and outside Euphoria the reputation rests on not much.
Fi1m perspective
Rue Bennett tells us in the first minutes of Euphoria that she has no intention of staying clean, in a voice so flat you could set a glass on it. Then Sam Levinson does the thing he always does. Every episode opens with Rue reading us one character's biography, childhood to present, so that by the time they speak we already know what they mean; then the party, the dozens of bodies, the phone screens. He wants the picture that needs no explaining and the explanation, and he wants them at the same time.
He started as an actor in his father's films and took his first writing credit on Operation: Endgame (2010). Another Happy Day (2011), which he wrote and directed, went to Sundance, as did Assassination Nation (2018), about social media, rage and teenage girls under attack; between them he wrote The Wizard of Lies (2017). Then came Euphoria, from 16 June 2019, three seasons of eight episodes each, finishing in 2026, and around it Malcolm & Marie (2021), a two-hander made in the pandemic, and The Idol (2023). The reviews for those last two were unkind, and the charge each time was the same: characters written too thinly to carry what was being done to them. We have not reviewed them. We will say the charge is one we recognise.
What works is the look and the acting, and the two are connected. Marcell Rév has shot four projects with him, and in the later seasons of Euphoria they moved to wider frames and real locations, so that a show which began in coloured light and bedrooms started to look like a place. Levinson has said that "the best, most honest performances are when an actor feels free and safe", and whatever he does on set, it shows. Zendaya's Rue is the real thing, and her opening minutes unsettled us more than any of the nudity that follows, because Zendaya plays a girl who has already decided and is only telling us as a courtesy. The show does not soften what addiction does to her or to the people around her, and that is its one unarguable virtue.
What does not work is the writing's need to prove itself. The locker-room nudity, the phone screens and the bodies at the party are there to show the series is unflinching, and it has shown it by the third episode and keeps showing it for five more. Kat Hernandez gets the strand that most wants credit for honesty and least earns it; Cassie Howard is written as the girl things happen to, which is the criticism most often made of Levinson's women and, on the evidence of the first season, a fair one. Eight editors are credited, and some episodes drift while others race. Levinson does not trust a face to do the work; he reads us the notes.
Euphoria is over. The next thing he makes will have to stand without Rue to explain it, and we are curious, and not confident.
Biography
Sam Levinson is an American screenwriter, director and producer. Born on 8 January 1985, he is the son of director Barry Levinson. He received his first writing credit on the 2010 film Operation: Endgame and made his directorial debut with Another Happy Day (2011), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. He also wrote for his father's 2017 television film The Wizard of Lies.
Levinson created, wrote and directed the HBO series Euphoria (2019), adapted from an Israeli series of the same name. The series ran for three seasons and concluded in 2026. His other feature films as writer and director include Assassination Nation (2018) and Malcolm & Marie (2021). He created the 2023 HBO series The Idol.
