SPOILER WARNING: Major character deaths and season 3 finale details below.
Euphoria is done. HBO and Sam Levinson confirmed after Sunday’s finale that the show will not return for a fourth season. After seven years, three seasons, a four-year gap between seasons two and three, two cast deaths, and more controversy than most shows generate in a decade, it is over.
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The finale killed off Rue, played by Zendaya, who died from a fentanyl overdose. During a dream sequence while she is overdosing, she has an emotional moment with Fezco, featuring unseen footage of Angus Cloud, who died in 2023 at age 25. Nate, played by Jacob Elordi, was killed off in the penultimate episode. Eric Dane, who played Cal Jacobs and passed away in February 2026 after an ALS diagnosis, appeared posthumously in two episodes of the season.
Levinson called Rue’s death “an honest ending.” Zendaya had already signalled on The Drew Barrymore Show in April that she believed Season 3 would be the last, saying: “Closure’s coming.”
And yet the reaction online has not been pure mourning. A big chunk of the conversation has been about whether the show actually earned any of this. The criticism is one that has been building since Season 2 and went full volume in Season 3: that Euphoria spent years raising serious conversations about addiction, sex work, queerness, abuse, and mental health, then used all of those topics as scenery for shock value rather than actually saying anything meaningful about them.
Rue’s addiction storyline went in circles for three seasons. Jules and Rue’s relationship got sidelined. The LGBTQ characters were either tragic or decorative. The drugs and nudity kept escalating without the emotional payoff to justify it.
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Some fans are genuinely heartbroken that it is over and feel the finale, for all its messiness, delivered a real ending. Others feel like the show never quite followed through on the promise of what it could have been. HBO lists Euphoria as one of the most-watched series in its history, so the numbers were always there. Whether the substance matched the spectacle is a different conversation entirely.
Sam Levinson dedicated the season to Angus Cloud and producer Kevin Turen. Whatever your feelings about where the show went, that dedication matters.
So what do you think? Did Euphoria earn its ending? Or did it use heavy topics as decoration and leave you wanting more? Drop it in the comments.
