When the second season finale of “Euphoria” aired Sunday night on HBO, the social media conversation about the gritty teen drama revolved around the death of one character, a battle royale between two other characters, and the arc of Rue, the troubled teenager. played by Zendaya.
But an actual person who was twice the age of every East Highland High School student on the show was also a major part of the fan discussion and memeing on TikTok, Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram. And most of the social media posts about him weren’t compliments, as fans wondered why different storylines didn’t end differently.
Sam Levinson, who created “Euphoria” (adapted an Israeli program of the same name), wrote all 18 hour-long episodes, and directed all but three of them, has emerged as a central figure in the story surrounding the show, with fans routinely watching social media to criticize his view of the characters.
His name has appeared in 300,000 tweets since this season aired on Jan. 9, Twitter said last week, a figure dwarfed by the listings of the show’s most popular characters, but nearly unheard of for a writer. (His listings are roughly comparable to those of “#Fexi,” short for the desired romantic combination of the characters Fezco and Lexi.) On TikTok, videos with the hashtag #SamLevinson have been viewed nearly 40 million times, the company said.
While some prestigious television programs have made their showrunners celebrities, it’s unusual for an off-screen writer-director to be so prominent in fan discourse. And the tenor is arguably different from the later seasons of an earlier HBO hit, “Game of Thrones,” when many fans argued that the showrunners were making an inferior product. Even Levinson’s critics admit that berating him for poorly serving a show they love—the same show he makes—as Slate’s Madeline Ducharme recently wrote, “is a very weird way to discourse about you.” favorite television program.” (Levinson declined to comment.)
The extraordinary discourse surrounding Levinson is the result of several salient features of ‘Euphoria’. It doesn’t have a writer’s room, as most shows like it do, HBO confirmed, so fans might find it fair to attribute most of the creative decisions to Levinson. It has become extremely popular and attracts great attention. Perhaps most importantly, it tells complex stories about people whose stories are often not nuanced in popular culture: people of color, drug addicts, queer and transgender – and high school students.
Put it all together, and you get Levinson an artist that fans love to hate, who makes something they love.
“It’s funny to suggest he should be taken off the show. It’s clearly his baby,” said Drew Gregory, a filmmaker and critic who has written about “Euphoria” for the queer news site Autostraddle. But she described fans’ irritation with Levinson as the exact result of things he’d done well in writing, casting and directing.
“You created these characters,” she said, describing the attitude of some fans. “I have become attached to it. And now you’re abandoning them and you’re deserting me.”
Paul Booth, a professor of media and film studies at DePaul University, said Levinson’s curious stature is both a continuation of fan culture trends dating back decades and a modern-day acceleration of those trends.
Social media, he said, “makes you feel like part of a community.” He added, “As a fan, you contribute to a greater cultural understanding of the lyrics, it creates a sense of ownership.”
Viewership has exploded this season, with the first episode drawing nearly 19 million viewers since its premiere, including on both HBO and HBO Max, the network said, which was more than two-and-a-half times the number of viewers last season. premiered during that season.
A common objection from fans is that Levinson sexualizes certain female characters inappropriately. Cassie, a high school character played by Sydney Sweeney, is filmed topless in several episodes. Sweeney said in an interview this year that she had opposed being naked in some scenes Levinson had written — adding that Levinson readily accepted her suggestions. A second actress, Minka Kelly, told Vanity Fair that she too had objected to being suggestively filmed in one scene this season, prompting Levinson to rewrite it.
Both actresses made it clear that they had no hard feelings. But many “Euphoria” fans do.
Francesca Hodges, a senior at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in a student-run newspaper that Sweeney’s striking nudity and sex scenes placed her squarely “into the male gaze,” adding that “Levinson uses Sweeney as a vessel for the projection of male fantasy.”
Some fans have objected to a reduced role this season for the character Kat, played by Barbie Ferreira. In a group interview in The Cut, Ferreira said her character’s arc this season is “a little more internal and a little bit mysterious to the audience.”
A subtext of many of the complaints about Levinson is one that is known from a wider discussion in many cultural spheres about who gets to tell which stories, and about the appropriation of characters, scenarios and experiences by creators closely related to marginalized people. groups to which they belong do not belong.
Some fans have wondered why characters who are diverse in many dimensions answer to a 37-year-old white male who grew up in the entertainment industry. (Levinson’s father is Oscar-winning director Barry Levinson.)
“It’s the whole premise of this straight cis guy writing a story about himself — about his past struggles with addiction — but then doing it through these different, diverse characters,” Hodges said in an interview.
Levinson has described the show in general and Rue in particular — who narrates the show — as extremely personal, saying he drew on his own experience with drug addiction.
“I feel like I’m watching a version of myself navigating the world at a young age,” Levinson said in a clip produced by HBO in 2019, when the first season was running.
“This show can’t be written by anyone else because it’s so personal,” Zendaya said in the same talk, adding to Levinson, “I feel like all the characters are just different facets of your personality.”
Playwright Jeremy O. Harris, co-producer this season, defended Levinson in a TikTok video. “It was great fun seeing people talking about ‘Euphoria’ and coming up with theories,” he said, but insisted the set was both safe and fun for the cast.
Levinson and others involved with the show have said there is a substantive creative collaboration between Levinson and the cast members. The only time he shared a writing credit was with Hunter Schafer, the transgender actress who plays Jules, a trans character who was the focus of the episode.
The episode “Excited Because It” not just one voice, bringing a breath of fresh air to quarantine spaces,” wrote critic Alison Herman in The Ringer.
Some fans analyze Levinson’s work through the lens of his identity, but praise his imaginative empathy in expressing his concerns through characters who are not quite like himself.
“Let’s open this conversation,” said Hadera McKay, a sophomore at Emerson College. She wrote a column in a student-run newspaper emphasizing the importance of examining Levinson’s “use of blackness,” yet found things about it in “Euphoria,” where Rue is the daughter of a black woman and a white woman. Jewish father, and “Malcolm & Marie,” a film Levinson wrote and directed and which appeared on Netflix last year (which also stars Zendaya).
McKay said she felt seen by Levinson’s writing. “Most critics were white and criticized his use of black characters to describe something that was his experience,” she said. “I thought that was too limited.”
