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Two quick warnings before I get cooking.

First of all, if you don’t watch Euphoria, I think you might still get something out of this newsletter entry.

Secondly, there will be spoilers about the finale of season 3 of Euphoria. So if you haven’t seen it, maybe come back later.

I generally have liked the show Euphoria, though it is one of those shows about young people that I constantly wonder if I should be watching. The show has an incredible amount of violence, sex, money and drug/alcohol use.

The substance abuse stuff is why I ultimately stuck with the show, because the Rue character, played by Zendaya, has had an interesting journey with sobriety. In fact, I think the best episode of Euphoria is actually a one-off episode featuring her and her sponsor sitting at a diner for an hour talking about sobriety.

So I kept watching the show through all eight episodes of Season 3, but it was a tough watch. I won’t entirely review the show as a TV critic would, but I will say that I gave it a C+. Some of the actors from the show have become big stars (Zendaya, Sydney Sweeney and Jacob Elordi are all A-list movie stars these days) and you could tell it was damn near impossible to get them all on set for a TV show. So there were lots of strange scenes that screamed that they couldn’t book the people together.

Also, I’m no prude, but the story spent a lot of time being overly sleazy, with characters we don’t know doing pretty grotesque behavior. Normally I don’t mind that—I’m certainly not squeamish about most stuff I see on TV or in movies. But I felt like the showrunner and brains of the whole Euphoria operation, Sam Levinson, was just poking fun at the criticism of him over the years, which is that he really enjoys pushing boundaries just for the sake of pushing them.

Levinson is an interesting storyteller. He has been clean and sober for 10-plus years, and he says his recovery journey has informed his storytelling. I have to be honest—I don’t love the ideas he injects into the show about recovery, and I had a serious feeling of discomfort about what he was trying to say in the finale episode.

A big spoiler: He kills off Rue halfway through the episode. She is supplied with drugs that are laced with fentanyl, and she dies on the couch of her sponsor, Ali. Ali is heartbroken. He keeps a notebook of all the people he has known who have died from drugs and alcohol, and it is a longgg diary of death. When that notebook was introduced earlier in the season, I immediately had skepticism about it, because this guy seems must have sponsored half of California to end up having that many sponsees who don’t make it. I guess that’s possible if you have been in an area of heavy drug use for a long period of time?

Anyway, Ali is broken by Rue’s death. He relapses and goes to a 12-step meeting, where he announces he is done with meetings. Then he goes home and saws off a shotgun. He takes that gun to a strip club where Rue had worked as a manager and he starts a shootout with the owner of the club who had supplied her with the opioids that killed her.

Honestly, I didn’t love any of that. I’m not sure what Sam Levinson wanted us to feel about recovery there. He constantly talks about how sobriety has been perhaps the most fundamental part of him turning his life around, and yet he puts this show out? That was confusing to me, especially since Euphoria’s audience is predominately young adults and high school kids. That might be their first exposure to addiction and recovery, and it isn’t exactly a love letter.

I could go on and on about that topic, but I’ll leave it there. I would encourage anybody—even if you don’t watch Euphoria—to check out the episode called “Trouble Don’t Last Always.” It’s a 64-minute episode of Zendaya sitting at a booth with her sponsor, played by Colman Domingo. It’s two awesome actors riffing on life, especially addiction, pain and sobriety. I thought it was a beautiful bottle episode that captures the essence of what we gain in sobriety—and what we have to lose. I wish that concept had made it to the end of the the series, rather than been left behind in that episode.

This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:

Back in the old wild west, a man was riding from Monterey to Salinas when he encountered a drunk lying in the road. The guy had an empty whiskey bottle beside him and his ear to the ground.

“What is it?” asked the traveler.

“Fifteen wagons, sixty horses, seventeen women, twenty-four men, five dogs, and a donkey,” replied the drunk.

“That’s incredible!” exclaimed the rancher. “You know all that just by listening to the ground?”

“No,” replied the drunk. “They ran over me about an hour ago.”

(Credit: AA Grapevine, November 2002, Ron L. from El Cajon, California)

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