HBO’s much-discussed series “Euphoria” has been hailed as the great, progressive youth series about sex, narcotics, gender and identity.

The young women in the series “reap the benefits of their bodies and their sexuality. They dress as suits them, have sex as suits them, and understand that this has no direct connection with their value or self-respect. At the same time, many of the male characters are a nuanced study in toxic and particularly fragile masculinity,” it is stated, for example, in a review in Ekko.

It is a classic emancipatory interpretation: sex, self-presentation and digital exposure are understood as empowerment, not as problems. The series is praised for being sensitive, respectful and “with” the young. A generational portrait that takes young women’s sexual self-determination seriously.

In other interpretations, the series is a structural, feminist critique of patriarchal middle-class culture and grievance culture. Others again see it as a queer, power-critical narrative of emancipation, in which the depiction of sex, narcotics and identity is intended to liberate the young from shame rather than to confirm conservative norms.

The Fall

Thus it has been in the first two seasons. But now the Fall has occurred:

The third season, which has just been released, is criticised by reviewers because it no longer confirms the progressive narrative. “Betrayal,” rages the reviewer in Politiken, who asks incredulously whether the series has “a core of values, or whether it is all merely cynical chaos, ragebait and breasts?”

That judgement of taste immediately aroused my interest. A series that receives only one star in Politiken – that series had to be seen.

I have not seen the first two seasons, but nevertheless decided to watch the three episodes that have so far been broadcast in the third season. My impression is the opposite of that of the Danish reviewers: “Euphoria” has value precisely because it appears as a conservative indictment of the boundless ideology of emancipation.

Politiken considers that the camera “indulgently wallows in sexualised degradation of women”. I understand the reviewer’s disgust. Fentanyl pellets are swallowed as if it were a hardcore pornographic blowjob, women defecate in miniskirts, a dog licks them between the legs, women pose in a thong on OnlyFans. Everything is unpleasant, lurid and ice-cold, exactly as the reviewer writes.

“Euphoria” is not a progressive project

But I do not see it as “indulgent”. For the question is whether it is the series that betrays its audience. Or whether it is the progressive reception that now discovers that the emancipatory project one projected into the first seasons never existed.

The reviewer in Politiken admits: “There were many of us who loved [the series], precisely because it was – we believed – a profound critique of sexual violence. Of abuse, from society, from norms, from powerful men.”

“Euphoria” was supposed to be a power-critical queerness with empathy and insight; the spirit of the age as a left-wing narrative of emancipation.

Conservatism in progressive guise

But here it is necessary to take the series more seriously than its – now disappointed – fans do. Some reviewers touch upon this, such as Jesse Arm in Unherd, who in “Euphoria” sees a kind of conservative art wrapped in progressive clothing.

The series does not preach virtue, but shows what a life without boundaries does to people. Namely, it destroys them. Thus a harsh critique of a culture in which pornification, normlessness and economic exploitation have become a way of life.

That the series is conservative is by no means a self-evident judgement. Conservative opinion-makers have also condemned the series, precisely because it resembles either moralistic progressivism or amoral vulgarity.

So how can I know that the series is conservative? That it does not merely indulgently wallow in misery and speculate in oppression? That it is precisely not cynical, but actually has a “core of values”?

I can know this because it contains counter-images to the misery, if one looks more closely.

The edifying counter-images

The main character Rue ends up with a Christian family in Texas: a modest home, a large group of children, a life revolving around faith and local rootedness. They take her in, help her, give her food, a bed and a ticket onwards without demanding anything in return. That is, the so often derided petty-bourgeois, “right-wing” nuclear family.

The same applies to the character Ali, Rue’s AA sponsor. He is a believer, speaks about the Bible (which Rue later listens to during her many car journeys) and tries to explain to a younger, libertarian generation that morality is not the same as hatred.

Opposed to him stands the reflexive rejection: everything that does not confirm the sexual orthodoxy is denounced as narrow-mindedness. The series does not allow him to win the discussion with a raised finger, but it gives him weight and authority; he is in fact the closest “Euphoria” comes to a father.

But in the Danish reception, the character counts for nothing.

Nowhere have I read about all these edifying counter-images. Why are the reviewers so blind to them?

The intolerant tolerance

Also consider the scene in which Rue suggests to Lexi that she is beginning to approach something religious. Lexi replies that she cannot be friends with a Christian, because Christians are judgemental. As Arm points out: one need not be a churchgoer to hear the irony: the tolerance of the ideology of emancipation extends to everything – except the one who actually believes in something other than the ideology of emancipation.

The series does not make a great issue of the scene. It merely notes that the young who call themselves open and inclusive are, in practice, deeply intolerant of faith and tradition.

I paid particular attention to this, since I have just read a major British study on the radicalisation of young women. They have become far more progressive than men have become conservative; they care neither about men nor about their country, and they do not wish to have children. And they are deeply unhappy.

Perhaps the “empathetic” lenses in 2019 were the illusion that is now being stripped away, leaving only the empirical reality. That is, a generation that has turned itself into commodities, because it was told that boundaries were oppression.

“Euphoria” may be more subtle than we think

The Danish reception is mistaken, I believe.

It may finally be read as what it perhaps has been all along. Namely, an unshakable image of life in a society where the old words about moderation, shame, honour, family and faith have been ridiculed to such an extent that few can speak about them and live by them. The result is not liberated happiness, but fentanyl, OnlyFans and dead, naked bodies.

If I am right, condemning the series thus becomes a way of avoiding the difficult questions. For if the series is merely Sam Levinson’s perversion, we can continue to believe that the problem lies with him, not with us and in our culture.

The more uncomfortable possibility is that “Euphoria” shows our own culture without filter. In that case, the betrayal that the reviewer in Politiken writes about is not that the series has abandoned left-wing emancipation. The betrayal is that we continue to insist on calling what we see liberation.

It is a subtle interpretation, and perhaps I am not right. The coming episodes of the series will show that. It will be interesting to follow them.