Euphoria should be watched like it's a soap opera

Vulture

"If you recoil at those two words, let me emphasize that soap operas — daytime classics like General Hospital and Days of Our Lives, prime-time classics like Dynasty and Grey’s Anatomy — are worthy of your respect," says Roxana Hadadi. "I grew up watching The Young and the Restless and The Bold and the Beautiful with my mom, and some of my earliest TV memories involve the cliffhangers that ended various episodes. At their core, soaps are longform storytelling driven by characters with tumultuous and spontaneous emotions they just can’t control. The pacing is often slow because the casts are so expansive, and the tone is a mix of winking self-awareness and magnified melodrama. It’s all heightened feelings, impulsive decision-making, and vibes, and isn’t that also what Euphoria is doing? Yes, Euphoria is a challenging story about addiction, forgiveness, empathy, and whether the worst thing you do defines you forever. Yet Euphoria has devoted a whole season to the roller-coaster ups and downs of two love triangles, and you could argue that one of them is actually a love rectangle that involves one of the people in the other love triangle. Consider, too, the grand declarations of affection, the shifting loyalties and alliances, and the enigmatic, mysterious characters. This is all soapy stuff, and placing these elements within that genre framework is the way to watch Euphoria without falling down a well of sadness. If you too are looking to catch up on the series before the second season wraps, keep these soapy clichés in mind to help counter all that trauma."

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• What it's like to work as a Euphoria extra: "Leading up to each Euphoria shoot, the background cast receives a 'treatment' with photographic examples of outfits that illustrate the tone of the scene," says the Los Angeles Times' Christi Carras, who profiles four Euphoria background actors. "For the New Year’s Eve sequence — which was initially shot last summer over nine long nights at a Woodland Hills mansion — the extras were instructed to wear flashy materials, such as sequins, golds and metallics." Carras adds: "Certain moments required less mental gymnastics to produce the desired crowd effect. For example, multiple background actors vividly remembered looking on in shock as Cloud repeatedly shattered a bottle over Elordi’s head for a climactic fight scene between Nate and tender-hearted drug dealer Fezco. The bottle prop was made of harmless candy material, but the punches looked real enough; Elordi was covered in fake blood, and the extras’ stunned reactions were genuine. It helped that the background actors were provided with little or no context for the brawl — later revealed to be a vengeful culmination of all the harm Nate has inflicted on Fezco, Jules, Maddy and others."
• Megan Thee Stallion says she loses it over Euphoria: “They got me on the edge of my seat,” she says. “They got me wanting to cry, wanting to scream and everybody is giving the best performances right now on Euphoria. I know these are characters and the show is not real, but they got me yelling at the TV like, ‘Girl, get it together! What are you doing?!'"
• Chloe Cherry slams online comments about her lips: “It’s crazy how many people talk about my lips being so big,” she tells Variety. “The amount of headlines that I have seen and the amount of people posting and commenting about my lips has been surreal.”
• Music supervisor Jen Malone explains how she turned Euphoria's soundtrack into a perfect fever dream
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• Dominic Fike tells Jimmy Fallon the fan theory that really resonated with him
• Twitter says Euphoria is the most-tweeted show of this decade, so far
• All the Euphoria actors are way too old for their parts -- here's how they actually looked as teenagers
• How big is the age gap between the Euphoria actors and the characters they portray?: 31-year-old Alexa Demie plays 18-year-old Maddy Perez