Since it premiered on HBO in 2019, Euphoria has been one of the most critically acclaimed shows on the air. But, due to its graphic depiction of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, it’s also been wildly controversial. While IndieWire’s review lauded Euphoria’s “rich authenticity,” conservative media advocacy group Parents Television and Media Council described the show as “dark, depraved, degenerate, and nihilistic.” This balance of critical acclaim and controversy is familiar to Martin Scorsese, whose blood-soaked gangster movies have been met with both universal praise and complaints of excessive violence. Euphoria creator Sam Levinson’s unapologetic approach to uncomfortable subject matter evokes the raw honesty of Scorsese’s work.
Adapted from an Israeli series by Ron Leshem and Daphna Levin, Euphoria is a unique kind of American high school show. It takes a premise that belongs on a network like The CW – the intertwining lives of a group of troubled teens in suburban L.A. – and brings it to the boundary-pushing airwaves of HBO. The series explores the familiar archetypes and story conflicts of shows like Degrassi and 90210 with the darkness of The Sopranos. Nate Jacobs initially seems like the same one-note obnoxious jock seen in every other teen drama, but the show has peeled back the layers to reveal self-harm, deep-seated rage, and a deeply dysfunctional home life.
As Euphoria’s second season comes to an end, many fans are looking for something to fill the void. But there’s no other show that has quite the same energy or flair as the HBO hit. After Euphoria’s deep dive into catfishing, suicidal ideation, and the horrors of withdrawals, the tame conflicts of every other teen drama feel redundant. From a stylistic standpoint, as surprising as it may seem, the best comparison to Euphoria is Scorsese’s magnum opus, Goodfellas.
When it hit theaters in 1990, Goodfellas arrived as a breath of fresh air. Crime films had become stale and formulaic before Goodfellas came along. The movie opens with young mafioso Henry Hill driving to the outskirts of New York in the middle of the night to dispose of a fellow gangster’s corpse, only to find that he’s not really dead. Then, Scorsese goes back to Henry’s childhood and starts jumping all over the place in telling the cautionary tale of a mobster in way over his head. Goodfellas’ runtime clocks in at around two-and-a-half hours, but it doesn’t feel anywhere near that long because it’s cut like a feature-length trailer. The opening hits like a speeding bullet and the ensuing biopic moves along at such a brisk pace that it dares viewers to look away.
Goodfellas is widely regarded to be one of the greatest movies ever made, but not necessarily for its content – more for its style. It’s not that Goodfellas favors style over substance. Like Euphoria, it uses its style to bolster the substance. In Goodfellas’ case, the rapid pacing captures the hectic nature of a life in organized crime. Scorsese plundered every trick in the cinematic playbook to pack every frame in Goodfellas with depth and detail. Euphoria uses the same lively techniques that Scorsese used to shake up the stale gangster genre to spruce up the well-worn teen drama genre.
They’re very different stories (except for the addiction part), but Goodfellas and Euphoria have very similar styles. The HBO series shares many stylistic hallmarks with Scorsese’s 1990 masterpiece: dark humor, fourth-wall breaking, fast-paced nonlinear storytelling, soundtrack needle-drops, kinetic cinematography, scattershot editing, and the most recognizable one, voiceover narration. Voiceover narration is generally considered to be lazy screenwriting, because it involves telling the story to the audience instead of showing it, but both Goodfellas and Euphoria have used it to spectacular effect by giving viewers an insight into how the protagonist’s mind works.
Even the critics who find Euphoria’s content to be gratuitous and pointless have praised Marcell Rév’s cinematography. With visual subtleties like low light and a gloomy color palette, Euphoria has emerged as one of the most cinematic shows on television. There’s no B-roll or stock footage or even conventional coverage; every shot in the series has been carefully crafted. Some of the most impressive shots in the series are meticulously planned tracking shots, like when Rue gets high and the room literally starts spinning (like the revolving hallway in Inception).
Goodfellas and Euphoria share one more tangible trait than a similar style. Both Henry and Rue struggle with drug addiction, and the directors of both projects found fascinating ways to visualize that addiction. In Goodfellas’ iconic climactic helicopter sequence, Scorsese uses paranoid framing, frenzied cutting, and an ever-changing soundtrack to put the audience in Henry’s frazzled mindset. In Euphoria’s surreal hallucination sequences, Levinson uses intriguing, unsettling imagery to chart Rue’s complicated relationship with narcotics. Neither Goodfellas nor Euphoria makes drug use look glamorous or cool, largely thanks to the riveting, unflinching performances of Ray Liotta and Zendaya making their characters’ battles with addiction feel painfully real.
HBO recently renewed Euphoria for a third season. After the second season settled into a more focused approach and brought more depth to the characters, it’ll be exciting to see where Zendaya, Levinson, and co. take this story in its third chapter. In the meantime, give Goodfellas a rewatch and let two-and-a-half hours of the wait for Euphoria’s next season fly by.
