Content Warning: The following article contains discussions of sexuality, drug addiction, homophobia, physical abuse, and self-harm.
Season 1 of Euphoria is in the books. It quickly became one of the most talked-about shows in recent memory for a variety of reasons. The HBO series pulled no punches as it painted a realistic and often graphic picture of the lives of teenagers struggling with many different problems.
Drug addiction, nudity, homophobia, violence, blackmail, abusive relationships, and much more were explicitly showcased in Euphoria. Almost every episode was followed by a lengthy discussion across social media platforms. One topic that often came up was how wild the show was and its most controversial moments.
Updated on September 10th, 2021 by Kevin Pantoja: Although Euphoria season 2 still doesn’t have an official premiere date, loyal fans are eager with anticipation. They can’t wait to see more of the characters they love and the controversial scenes that make the show so unique. To tide viewers over, two special episodes were aired that centered on Rue and Jules. While they were different from the core show, these episodes still featured plenty of scenes that left the audience talking for days, just like they did with the shocking moments from season 1.
Updated on February 27th, 2022 by Kevin Pantoja: Now that Euphoria has delivered on season 2, it’s interesting to see where the show has gone in terms of controversial scenes. In season 1, everything was a surprise but by now, the audience is more used to the show focusing on touchy subject matter. While it’s more expected at this point, that doesn’t stop some of the scenes from being controversial and talked about by almost everyone the following week. There are still things like sex, drugs, and nudity in Euphoria but with those scenes not being as shocking, finding controversial ones is a bit tougher.
Elliot & Jules
Considering the break between seasons 1 and 2, fans waited so long to see Jules and Rue become an official couple. Following the special episodes surrounding each of them, Rue and Jules finally became official in the season 2 premiere, only for Elliot to throw a wrench into that plan in the next installment.
Rue spent a lot of time with him but it was Jules who ended up forming a more romantic bond with him. While them hooking up isn’t a taboo storyline, it was controversial because fans took to social media to discuss their major issues with it, especially in regards to how Jules said she was no longer interested in men romantically.
Jules’s Explanation Of Her Relationship With Rue
Although she’s a great character and representative for the LGBTQ+ community, Jules Vaughn (Hunter Schafer) is someone whom audiences kind of turned on late in season 1. She seemed to abandon Rue (Zendaya) and that upset viewers. Thankfully, the special episode centered on her shed light on what this relationship means to her.
Jules does love Rue but there’s a lot of pressure on those feelings. Jules gets the sense that if she’s not there for Rue, her sobriety somewhat depends on it, meaning she could hold Rue’s life in her hands. Considering her rejection of her own mother for similar reasons led to a relapse, revealed in this episode, Jules’s feelings are understandable.
Almost Everything Rue Reveals In Her Special Episode
Rue’s special episode is more contained than Jules’s, mostly seeing the protagonist sit in a diner and have a conversation with her NA sponsor, Ali (Colman Domingo). During this deep conversation, almost every important topic is brought up from sobriety to the Black Lives Matter movement, and secrets are revealed.
Among them is Rue explaining that she doesn’t think she’ll be around long since either suicide or a drug overdose are very possible. Rue also inadvertently revealed that she’s an unreliable narrator, as a scene from season 1 where she and Jules get matching tattoos is said to not have happened. That means most of what the audience came to believe from her could be completely false.
Ali Was A Domestic Abuser
Rue certainly wasn’t the only character to reveal something during the intense conversation in the special episode. Ali said some poignant things that fans will likely never forget but the biggest was about his history with domestic violence both when it comes to his father and to himself.
Ali said that he hated his father for being a violent man towards his mother and vowed not to be that way. However, when he became addicted to drugs, he did the same thing to his own wife. “Drugs change who you are as a person,” he said, shining a pretty terrible light on a character who the audience adored but also showcasing that he understood where Rue was coming from.
Young Characters Having Sex
Many shows on HBO or any premium cable channel, feature an abundance of sex scenes and nudity. That turned out to be the case with Euphoria, though some members of the audience found this to be a questionable decision.
Since the series centers around teenagers who are still in high school, depicting them in raunchy sex scenes is seen as tasteless by some. There are nude photos and a handful of Euphoria sex scenes, despite the characters being underage in almost every case. While the actors portraying them are all adults, it’s still a bit off-putting for some to see on screen sometimes.
Kat’s Webcam Career
Kat Hernandez (Barbie Ferreira) is a girl who begins the show as pretty innocent. However, she yearns to be more promiscuous and to explore her sexuality. That ultimately leads to her becoming more confident in herself and Kat loving the way she looks, which she previously struggled with.
Her sex scenes are one thing, but it was her time as a webcam performer that drew more controversial responses. Considering that Kat interacts with grown men in a sexual manner during these webcam conversations, it can be uncomfortable for some audiences. That was made even clearer when the show depicted one of these men pleasuring himself while talking to Kat in explicit fashion.
The Locker Room Scene
Nudity is a common aspect of premium cable shows. However, that is most often associated with women as male nudity just doesn’t happen as much in the world of film and television. That’s not how Euphoria handled things. In just the second episode, “Stuntin’ Like My Daddy,” there’s a scene that took viewers inside the locker room of the high school’s football team.
That scene was filled with a reported 37 penises on the screen at one time. It was considered controversial by some who aren’t comfortable with that increased level of nudity, but it was an important scene given the consistent topic of Nate Jacobs’s (Jacob Elordi) homophobia.
Nate’s Dream Sequences
The mind of Nate Jacobs is a pretty terrifying place. The audience has seen Nate do some awful things as part of his violent streak and homophobia. That’s why getting a look inside his head can be so scary and it gets controversial when his sexuality is brought into the conversation.
Nate insists that he’s straight but his behavior has shown otherwise and while that’s fine, the controversy comes into play when you consider how it connects to his dad. A daydream sequence where he pictured sex with Maddy, Cassie, and Jules led to him having a vision of his own father seemingly having sex with him.
Jules’s Tragic Backstory
A trend of the show was that most episodes opened by detailing the backstory of a particular Euphoria character. The episode following Jules took audiences back to her childhood and how her parents dealt with the way she was feeling about her body.
On its own, this is a topic that gets a lot of conversation these days, so what made this flashback so controversial was what Jules’ mother does. She leaves a crying Jules all alone at a psychiatric hospital because she couldn’t handle the fact that Jules wanted to transition. While there, Jules also started to self-harm and that’s the kind of thing that can be very triggering for a lot of audience members.
Maddy And Nate’s Toxic Relationship
At a carnival where pretty much every character came together for one reason or another, Nate attacked his girlfriend Maddy Perez (Alexa Demie). It was done both in retaliation for offensive names she called his mother and out of frustration as she had begun closing in on his secret. Nate violently choked Maddy in a scene that was hard to watch for many who have experienced that kind of relationship.
What made it more difficult was watching how Maddy constantly defended Nate. She understood how toxic he was and what he did to her, but she wouldn’t give him up to the cops, instead doing everything possible to cover it up. Watching the cops have to physically remove some of her clothing to see the bruises because she was so adamant about defending him was all too real for far too many viewers.
Tyler Gets Blackmailed
Poor Tyler (Lukas Gage). In the pilot episode, he seemed like just a random hookup for Maddy to make Nate jealous. But in the following episode, viewers found that Nate had become obsessed with Tyler. He snuck into Tyler’s apartment and brutally beat him up to the point where he was hospitalized.
Nate didn’t leave it at that. He then blackmailed Tyler to take the fall for him in the case of the abuse on Maddy by blackmailing him because Maddy was 17 when he was intimate with her. Nate used the same blackmail tactic to get Jules to pinpoint Tyler as the culprit as well. It was one of the many moments that made Nate the most hated character in the show.
Cassie Has An Abortion
One of the key plotlines heading into the season finale, “And Salt the Earth Behind You,” was Cassie Howard’s (Sydney Sweeney) pregnancy. She had an emotional conversation with the unborn child’s father, Chris McKay (Algee Smith) in the prior episode and it was clear that he didn’t want her to keep it. The finale spent several scenes cutting back to Cassie and her family dealing with the pregnancy.
Cassie went to an abortion clinic and had her pregnancy terminated. Any show that deals with this touchy topic often draws a lot of controversies. The fact that Euphoria did so in a more in-depth fashion than most is what made this scene stick out. Cassie listened to music as viewers saw the doctor doing some of the procedure and the nurse holding her hand.
Jules And Cal’s Hookup
The first glimpse that viewers got of Jules saw her preparing for a night out. She was receiving sexts and on her way to meet a mysterious man at a hotel, who turned out to be Cal Jacobs (Eric Dane). Considering the twenty-plus-year age difference between the characters and the fact that Jules is underage, it makes the scene wildly uncomfortable.
To add to the experience, the show provided a violent, graphic sex scene between the two. The way Jules was just left in a heap at the end of it was extremely difficult to watch and a shocking sight for the pilot episode of a series.
Gia Finds Rue After Her Overdose
Netflix made a major change to one of its most popular shows when they went back and edited out the graphic suicide scene in 13 Reasons Why because it was too controversial and upset many viewers. While the overdose scene in Euphoria isn’t as disturbing, it was controversial for similar reasons.
The sight of Rue’s overdose is very tough to sit through. Her little sister Gia (Storm Reid) finds her unconscious and viewers see as paramedics rush to try and save her life. They ultimately succeed, but it is still something that many audience members found triggering.
One Direction Fan Fiction
Other than a series like South Park, animation isn’t often a source for controversy. But Euphoria featured a rare animated scene that was the talk of Twitter for a few days. In the episode “Made You Look,” viewers found out that Kat was quite popular online as a fanfiction writer. Her most famous entry revolved around some members of One Direction.
While the story about Kat’s fan fiction is told, an animated scene played out featuring One Direction members Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson in a sexual relationship. It angered many One Direction fans online and, as reported by Billboard even Tomlinson himself addressed it, saying he didn’t approve it. Some fans of One Direction went as far as to boycott the show.