Review: Euphoria, "This Little Piggy" | Season 3, Episode 5

"Maybe the quantity is preventing you from finding the quality."

I always find it fascinating when screenwriters tell on themselves in their own work, whether consciously or not. The above line of dialogue, uttered by Maddy in this week's episode "This Little Piggy," is almost too perfect of an encapsulation of what makes Euphoria such a maddeningly hollow and pretentious show to watch. It has so many timely themes on its mind and so many aesthetic tricks it wants to flex that its ambition always ends up exceeding its grasp.

In the show's first season, Sam Levinson's tendency to prioritize style over substance worked to a degree, crafting an immersive, freewheeling vibe that made the misery porn of its teen melodrama go down a bit easier. In its second season, the allure of that vibe started to wane a bit as the narrative increasingly went off the rails and continued to double down on its nastier impulses. Now in its third season, Euphoria has completely lost the plot, both in a literal and figurative sense, placing its characters in storylines that ultimately feel less interested in expanding on and deepening their arcs and more designed to satisfy Levinson's evil adolescent trolling and Diet Tarantino/Verhoeven/de Palma tics. "This Little Piggy" proves to be the latest and most galling example of these inflammatory, self-indulgent, and vacuous aims, functioning not just as one of the worst episodes of Euphoria, but maybe one of the worst hours of television I've seen in a long time.

Let's start with Cassie's subplot, as it remains the most ridiculous yet least effective of this season's storylines and opens the episode on a pretty audacious note. Now that she's received some clout after collaborating with Brandon Fontaine, Cassie begins to rack up more followers as an OnlyFans influencer and meets the increased demand with gusto. She carries out a series of requests (sexy ASMR, mailing used underwear, more photos of fetish-y outfits, videos of furious masturbation) and flaunts her right-wing ragebait brand on podcasts (in what feels like a curiously metatextual allusion to Sydney Sweeney's questionable real-life politics). Levinson stages all of this in one voyeuristically icky sequence, culminating it with an Attack of the 50 Foot Woman homage that's somehow even more absurdly leering, as Sweeney's bare breasts smash into the office of one of her many admirers. If Levinson's goal with this season was to get a rise out of his audience by putting his characters in the most outrageous situations possible, then he's succeeded with flying colors. But at what cost? What do we as an audience get out of watching characters like Cassie make absolute fools of themselves week after week, especially when there seems to be a total, nihilistic, self-righteous disregard for character depth or dramatic tension?