The portrayal of women in “Euphoria” has often sparked debate, and Sam Levinson’s provocative HBO drama reaches new extremes with Sydney Sweeney’s character, Cassie Howard, in its third season. As the series progresses, Cassie’s narrative has become a focal point, raising questions about the show’s overarching themes and its depiction of female characters.

When “Euphoria” debuted in the summer of 2019, it introduced viewers to a gritty high school world through the eyes of Rue Bennett, a recovering drug addict played by Zendaya—whose performance has earned her two Emmy Awards. Alongside Rue, the series explores the lives of her friends, including Cassie, her by-the-book sister Lexi (Maude Apatow), Cassie’s steadfast best friend Maddy Perez (Alexa Demie), the confident and body-positive Kat Hernandez (Barbie Ferreira), and Maddy’s tumultuous partner Nate Jacobs (Jacob Elordi). Rue also becomes captivated by Jules Vaughn (Hunter Schafer), a transgender student navigating her gender and sexual identity in often perilous circumstances.

While “Euphoria” has always leaned heavily on shock value, Season 2 escalated this tendency, and Season 3 intensifies it further. The show employs a five-year time leap, aging its characters into their twenties, and one need only look at Cassie’s storyline to grasp this shift. Levinson often shies away from deeply analyzing Cassie, yet her narrative is predominantly defined by how she is perceived by men. This focus on Cassie underscores broader issues within “Euphoria,” sparking significant discussion.

So, what exactly is Cassie Howard’s storyline in Season 3, and why has it stirred such controversy? In the previous season, Cassie engaged in a clandestine relationship with Nate, which was kept secret due to his ties with her best friend, Maddy. When Maddy uncovered the truth, chaos ensued. Fast forward five years, and Cassie and Nate are cohabitating in a lavish, albeit kitschy, mansion, planning a wedding. However, underlying tensions surface when Nate hesitates to spend $50,000 on floral arrangements, prompting Cassie to take control of her destiny by embarking on a new venture as an erotic influencer.

Wait, so what is Cassie Howard’s storyline in Season 3 of “Euphoria,” and why is everyone so mad about it? Here’s the deal. You may remember that, in Season 2, Cassie and Nate started a secret relationship — secret because of Nate’s connection to Maddy, Cassie’s very best friend — and when Maddy did find out, the situation imploded. Still, with this five-year time jump, we learn that Cassie and Nate live together in the tackiest possible mansion and are getting married soon, but there’s trouble in paradise. Despite the trappings of wealth, Nate balks at spending $50,000 on floral arrangements for their wedding, and frustrated by this stand, Cassie decides to take matters into her own hands … and start working as an erotic influencer.

To say this plotline is demeaning is an understatement, and that’s not meant to impugn successful, happy erotic influencers and OnlyFans content creators. It is meant to impugn Sam Levinson, who uses this opportunity to truss the buxom Sydney Sweeney up like a Thanksgiving turkey and put her into increasingly embarrassing costumes and set-ups. There’s a shot where she’s fully nude with ice cream dripping down her arm. There’s a shot where she’s fully nude holding a strategically placed baseball mitt. There’s a scene where she’s dressed as a dog, complete with a leash … and she’s wearing Sweeney’s real-life lingerie line to boot. There’s also a full scene where she’s not fully nude but dressed like a baby, complete with a diaper and pacifier, spreading her legs for the camera operated by her beleaguered housekeeper Juana (Minerva García). We’re supposed to, presumably, find this empowering for Cassie, but the way Levinson paints it is anything but.

That whole “sexy baby” situation got a lot of play on social media platforms like X (formerly known as Twitter), even during the week between the Season 3 premiere “Ándale” aired and the second episode “America My Dream” debuted. On the platform, user @aribudincita wrote, “Man, Cassie from ‘Euphoria’s’ pic dressed like a baby is disgusting.” Another, @jiya1402, made it pretty personal. “I was never too fond of [Sydney Sweeney] to begin with but this just makes her the worst person in the world,” they wrote alongside pictures of her in the dog and baby costumes. “Like…. I can’t stand to look at her.” @Davebarrerita wondered how Sweeney and Jacob Elordi — who appears in a scene in the Season 3 premiere where Cassie’s in that now-infamous dog get-up — could even perform under these circumstances. “This is so embarassing even for [Jacob],” they mused. “But, how [can] Sydney Sweeney agree to do something like this? It’s like a humillation ritual.” 

Other people pointed to creator Sam Levinson as “the problem,” so to speak. “Sam Levinson needs to be investigated! How the hell did we go from that purple glitter aesthetic to fart f*tish, doggy f*tish and the cartel???” user @ar1esprincesa wondered. Even before the season started, people were clocking Levinson, like @SailorSammy93: “Just saw a pic of Cassie in [‘Euphoria’ Season 3] … I need someone to go through Sam Levinson’s hard drive.”

Frankly, anyone who’s familiar with “Euphoria” should be unsurprised that Levinson is pushing things this far, particularly where Cassie is concerned. It’s not like he took it any easier on Cassie — or Sweeney, for that matter — during the show’s first two blockbuster seasons.

The first season of “Euphoria,” to Sam Levinson’s credit, does something interesting in that each episode focuses on a different main character, with Zendaya’s Rue narrating details about their life that give some context as to who they are as teenagers. As far as Cassie is concerned, we learn about her early childhood with her well-meaning but overbearing mother Suze Howard (always-welcome utility player Alanna Ubach) and her largely absent dad Gus (Nick Blood), as well as her prowess as a young ice-skater. Gus leaving the family and dealing with substance abuse issues made life scary and difficult for Cassie, who was very attached to her father; essentially, this entire set-up is designed for the audience to understand that Cassie finds self-worth in the eyes of men due to a damaged relationship with her dad.

This manifests as early as Season 1, where we see Cassie dating a guy named Chris McKay (Algee Smith), who seems nice enough but also pressures her into sending him nude photos — and, we learn, is the father of an unborn child. (Cassie terminates the pregnancy.) In Season 2, we get that aforementioned storyline between Nate and Cassie as they sneak around behind Maddy’s back … and after Maddy finds out about their secret relationship, she goes full scorched-earth as an increasingly desperate Cassie, usually hysterically screaming and crying, tries to hold onto Nate through whatever means necessary. (Remember her drunkenly vomiting in the hot tub halfway through the season after wearing a teeny-tiny bathing suit to pull Nate’s attention away from Maddy?!) There were some flickers of more interesting stories throughout Cassie’s narrative, but by this point, she’s fallen victim to Levinson’s worst impulses when it comes to his female characters.

While Sydney Sweeney’s Cassie feels like the most egregious example of Sam Levinson’s often abhorrent approach to his female characters, she’s certainly not alone. Before we even get to the Season 3 of it all, it feels very important to note that you won’t see Barbie Ferreira’s name mentioned in conjunction with that season. Why? Ferreira left “Euphoria” after Season 2, during which her character Kat was sidelined and, frankly, disrespected with lackluster storylines. Rumors have swirled for years that Levinson and Ferreira feuded, she recently opened up on the “Not Skinny But Not Fat” podcast about why she left. As she told host Amanda Hirsch, her character arc “just wasn’t going anywhere” and she wanted a chance to challenge herself as a performer. “”I don’t need to be on the biggest TV show on earth if I’m not, like, acting,” she said.

Whether or not there was ever any actual bad blood between Levinson and Ferreira is one thing, but the way that Levinson treats his female characters in Season 3 of “Euphoria” feels … rough. Aside from Lexi, who always manages to come out of this show miraculously unscathed, the women of “Euphoria” aren’t ever having a particularly good time. Maddy’s career, we learn in “America My Dream,” is floundering — and her only salvation is to manage erotic influencers. (More on that shortly.) Rue is a drug mule, as is her friend Faye (former adult performer Chloe Cherry, who deserves better than anything this show gives her). Levinson makes a habit out of disrespecting women on “Euphoria,” and Cassie happens to be the worst instance of this impulse.

It might sound dramatic to say that Cassie’s storyline on “Euphoria” just clarifies that the show’s foundation isn’t sound, but it’s not hyperbole; it’s just the truth. The pivot that Cassie makes during “America My Dream” is that she decides she wants to create adult content for OnlyFans, the constantly-growing platform where adult content creators control their own businesses. Again, this is not meant to disrespect the many creators on that platform; what we’re trying to say here is that making Cassie into an OnlyFans model feels like the laziest possible choice for this character and for Sam Levinson as a writer and showrunner.

Point in fact, it feels like a joke that any average “Euphoria” viewer could have offhandedly made during the long wait between Seasons 2 and 3 that Cassie becomes an OnlyFans model … and even worse, one who struggles to even break through on the platform. This doesn’t speak to any growth or evolution for Cassie whatsoever — it’s just more of the same for her character, whose emotional journey is non-existent and hasn’t really been a part of the show since Season 1. “Euphoria” tries to add an ostensibly empowering aspect to Cassie’s career goals, but that, too, falls flat.

After their blow-up over Nate at the end of Season 2 of “Euphoria,” it felt like Maddy and Cassie’s long friendship was probably over — but in “America My Dream,” Cassie reaches out to Maddy as the latter is floundering in her job as the assistant to a powerful publicist. Maddy bites and, after the two meet at a posh Hollywood hotel and drink multiple Aperol Spritzes by the pool, Maddy tells Cassie that she’s not sure her approach to her content is working and agrees to manage her.

So what’s the problem here? Sam Levinson actually spells it out for us, both in the dialogue and the voiceover. As we see several of Cassie’s photoshoot attempts, Nue narrates, “It was a shame she was with Nate. Cassie was the kind of girl Maddy dreamed of signing. Beautiful, but directionless. So desperate for attention she’s willing to humiliate herself. Those are the kind of girls you can really mine.” Later, by the pool, Maddy tells Cassie, “Yeah, the doggie video? It’s fun and it’s campy, but it’s not sexy and it’s not timeless. It just feels desperate. It feels like you’re trying way too hard.” Levinson’s outright disdain for Cassie, expressed through these very blunt lines, erases any attempt at empowerment by having another young woman manage her career — and throughout the run of “Euphoria,” Levinson’s love of exploitation has been an issue off-camera as well.

During Season 2 of “Euphoria,” there were two concrete examples of Sam Levinson asking actresses to do nude scenes that they found to be totally unnecessary to the actual narrative. Speaking to Vanity Fair, “Friday Night Lights” alum Minka Kelly, who appeared in the second season of the HBO series as a wealthy woman named Samantha who hires Maddy as a babysitter and then befriends her, said she had to ask Levinson to dial back a nude scene.

“[Levinson] thought it would be more interesting if my dress fell to the ground,” Kelly said, noting that she felt uncomfortable. “That was my first day as a guest on this new show, and I just didn’t feel comfortable standing there naked.” Kelly challenged Levinson and won. “I said, ‘I’d love to do this scene, but I think we can keep my dress on,’” she said. “He was like, ‘Okay!’ He didn’t even hesitate. And he shot a beautiful scene and got exactly what he wanted.”

Sydney Sweeney wasn’t immune to this either. Before Season 2 premiered, she told The Independent that she also asked Levinson to tone down the nude scenes. As she remembered, “there are moments where Cassie was supposed to be shirtless and I would tell Sam, ‘I don’t really think that’s necessary here.’ He was like, ‘OK, we don’t need it’. I’ve never felt like Sam has pushed it on me or was trying to get a nude scene into an HBO show. When I didn’t want to do it, he didn’t make me.”

It’s good that Levinson backed down, but the fact that the actresses had to say something is … not good. Plus, we’ve seen his worst instincts run amok — on “The Idol.”

Between seasons of “Euphoria,” Sam Levinson turned his attention to “The Idol,” a one-season terror about a pop star played by Lily-Rose Depp (who’s quite good with the meager material she’s given) who falls in love with a controlling man played by actual pop star The Weeknd (who is terrible). After ending suddenly and leaving viewers baffled, it can be viewed as a cultural artifact that shows us exactly how far Levinson will push boundaries if left to his own devices; instead of a treatise about how pop stars are treated and exploited in society, Levinson simply exploited a fictional pop star to prove some sort of sick and ultimately empty point. 

There’s also the issue of how “The Idol” treats its own fictional intimacy coordinator … something that points to a larger issue with how Levinson views these professionals. While “Euphoria” has utilized an intimacy coordinator throughout all of its seasons per HBO’s in-house rules — and Amanda Peek is listed as the intimacy coordinator for Season 3 on the show’s IMDb page — it’s worth looking at “The Idol” and its incredibly bleak view of this extremely important role on set. (Remember the scene where they lock an intimacy coordinator in a bathroom to stop him from doing his job?!) It’s troubling that we know exactly what Levinson thinks of these coordinators, who only exist on set to keep actors feeling safe during vulnerable scenes, and it’s disturbing that on a show that asks so much of its actors, like “Euphoria” — and it’s another factor that speaks to the show’s larger issues.

So what can we expect to see from Sydney Sweeney’s Cassie Howard throughout Season 3 of “Euphoria?” Well, she’ll presumably marry Nate and continue pursuing a career as an erotic influencer, so the real question is how much humiliation Sam Levinson will put the actress and character through when all is said and done.

Something that, honestly, stinks about this whole thing is that Sweeney is put into a position where she has to defend Levinson’s apparent worst impulses. While speaking to W Magazine in 2025, Sweeney said she feels totally comfortable with this sort of material. “I don’t get nervous,” Sweeney said of nude scenes. “I think that the female body is a very powerful thing. And I’m telling my character’s story, so I owe it to them to tell it well and to do what needs to be done.”

This is a great sentiment, but it does not, in any way, match up with Cassie’s journey on “Euphoria.” Cassie’s body isn’t “powerful” in this season, but something to be gawked at and objectified for a very flimsy narrative purpose. What Sweeney “owes” to Cassie boils down to gratuitous and sometimes embarrassing scenes, and if this is the story she’s telling, the rest of Season 3 of “Euphoria” could be rough for Sweeney and Cassie. We’ll have to find out; “Euphoria” airs new episodes at 9 p.m. on HBO and HBO Max every Sunday.