Television

It’s officially been four years since Euphoria last had us spiraling, and somehow the return still feels slightly unreal.

After what felt like endless delays, rewrites, and scheduling chaos, season three is finally taking shape and it’s not picking up where we left off. The biggest shift is a time jump, pushing the story past high school and into a more adult, unpredictable phase.

At the center of it all is still Zendaya as Rue, bringing that same raw energy that made the show impossible to look away from in the first place. And while the visuals are expected to stay just as dreamy and stylized, there’s a sense that this chapter will dig even deeper emotionally.

What makes this return so exciting is the timing. Four years is long enough for the hype to build, but also long enough for the show to come back with something fresh to say.

There is also a quiet curiosity around how the show will reflect where its audience is now. The viewers who once watched for the chaos are coming back older, maybe a little more self aware, and ready for something that feels just as bold but more evolved.

If Euphoria gets it right, it won’t just remind everyone why they loved it. It might change the conversation all over again.

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Adapted from Rufi Thorpe’s acclaimed novel Margo’s Got Money Troubles, the new series premiering on Apple TV showcases a stellar cast led by Elle Fanning, who takes on the role of twenty-year-old Margo Millet, bringing the fierceness that has been on display in her best work. The supporting ensemble, including the actors playing Margo’s complicated mother (a former Hooters waitress) and her estranged father (a former pro-wrestler), and Nicole Kidman as Executive Producer, gives the series weight (and her cameo).

We meet Margo, a community college student, who finds herself pregnant after an affair with her married English professor. Against all counsel, she keeps her baby. And when she discovers that traditional work and societal systems cannot support her small family, she takes advantage of the internet and creates a side hustle with OnlyFans, treating the platform as a business storefront.  Using her intelligence, she studies the algorithms and begins to realize the counsel from her father is making sense.  Margo’s new profession oddly parallels that of his former gig as a pro-wrestler, making him very familiar with using your physicality to entertain and monetize as a brand. OnlyFans, the show suggests, is not that different from the WWE; only the costumes and medium are changed.

This is a series that sidesteps titillation and preaching; it brings humor, love, determination, and strength of character into focus, demonstrating that our voyeuristic society has created a fertile landscape for making a living by being watched.

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Rage is a shared language among humans of all stripes. Its underbelly is fueled now as housing feels unreachable, work feels tiring, the comfortable seem oblivious, and many of us walk around with a sensation of an app running in the background draining our batteries. That is the air Beef breathes. The Netflix anthology returns with a new pair of strangers locked in escalating fury, headlined by Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan, reunited more than a decade after Inside Llewyn Davis, where their wounded chemistry gave the Coens’ film its aching core. Here, Isaac plays a country club manager, smoothing the feathers of wealthy members, desperate to be accepted into a world he cannot inhabit. Mulligan is his wife, an interior designer creating beauty for others while her marriage browns around the edges. Their uneasy lives are upended by a younger couple, played by Cailee Spaeny and Charles Melton, who are club employees, deeply in debt, with the recognition that the generations above them have pulled up the ladder of success. Beef has always created a chemical reaction in which the dark is punctuated by the absurd. You catch yourself laughing while your toes curl inside your shoes. The show offers a release for our messy current times, and we root for a happy ending. Creator Lee Sung Jin again reminds us of the humanity underneath our rage.

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A love triangle gone wrong leads to the death of one involved party in new HBO miniseries DTF St. Louis.

David Harbour (Stranger Things, The Equalizer, Black Widow) and Jason Bateman (Ozark, Arrested Development, Black Rabbit) star as Floyd and Clark, two middle-aged men who, when they begin to find their marriages unsatisfying, decide to go on a hookup app called DTF St. Louis to… well, cheat on their partners. Clark and Floyd are news co-anchors, friends, and perhaps a little too involved in one another’s lives. When it’s revealed that Bateman’s character Clark is in love with Harbour’s character’s wife, played by Linda Cardellini (Brokeback Mountain, Scooby-Doo, Avengers: Age of Ultron), it becomes clear that things can’t possibly end well.

Floyd (Harbour) is a charmingly naive foil to Clark’s cynicism; when he joins the app, he chooses the username “Rocksolid” because he thinks he’s “a pretty dependable guy”. It paints Clark in an even worse light the more we get to know Floyd, which makes the dramatic tension between their friendship and Clark’s affair with Floyd’s wife rise even higher. The stakes are raised by the ongoing murder investigation that is shown to us in bits and pieces from a future perspective; who died, and why were they killed? Nothing is as it seems. The limited series is part crime drama, part dark comedy, and entirely one worth watching.

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