Is it even a week in America if everyone isn’t losing their minds over something Sydney Sweeney said, sold, promoted, or performed? She’s the Helen of Troy of 2026, the woman that launched a thousand takes.
This week, the uproar is about what Sweeney’s character is up to in the new season of HBO’s lightning rod of a show, Euphoria. Given that its first two seasons introduced the characters as a disturbed bunch of high schoolers who were addicted to drugs, sex, revenge—you name it!—viewers might’ve expected to be shocked by the third. And yet, somehow, the latest season is the one that’s been met with the most pearl-clutching.
The big fish have graduated from their small pond to the ocean; they’re all in their early 20s now, and trying to carve out lives for themselves in and around Los Angeles. The show’s narrator, Rue (Zendaya), who once stole pain meds from a dying woman, is now a drug runner; the former queen bee, Maddy (Alexa Demie), who once called her boyfriend’s mother a cunt in front of a crowd at a carnival, is now an assistant. And Sweeney’s character, Cassie—who had an abortion at 16, then a nervous breakdown in front of the entire high school—now lives in “some right-wing suburban bubble,” according to Rue’s voice-over, and is spending “her free time trying to become TikTok famous.”
