HBO renews Euphoria for a third season

Euphoria, the provocative high school drama starring Zendaya, will be getting a third season, HBO announced Friday. The series’ second season is currently airing, with the eighth and final episode scheduled for Feb. 27.

Zendaya plays Rue Bennett, a teenager who struggles with addiction and is processing the death of her father. At her high school, Rue narrates the melodrama of her and her peers’ lives — which often includes sex, drugs, and violence.

Key characters include Hunter Schafer as Bennett’s best friend, Jules Vaughn, and Angus Cloud as Fezco, the local drug dealer, who maintains a close relationship with Rue. Rue also narrates the lives of other classmates, like Maddy Perez (Alexa Demie), Nate Jacobs (Jacob Elordi), Kat Hernandez (Barbie Ferreira), and Cassie Howard (Sydney Sweeney).

Euphoria follows a large cast of characters, and often jumps between telling their different stories. The series is based on the Israeli series of the same name, created by Ron Leshem and Daphna Levin. Euphoria debuted in June 2019, and its pandemic-delayed second season arrived last month with a bang — the premiere is currently “the most viewed episode of an HBO series ever on HBO Max,” with more than 14 million viewers across platforms, HBO said in a news release. That’s over twice the audience for the first season, which averaged 6.6 million viewers per episode (in a pre-HBO Max world).