If you ever watched Spring Breakers and wished it had a coherent script with emotional tethering and recognizably human conflicts, then Euphoria Season 2 is for you. It takes seriously its role as a cinematic serial that speaks candidly about pain (and pain’s opposite), but also takes seriously - much more than its first season - its function as a means of artful escape.

This is a function inherent to its medium - television - but the degrees to which a show must adhere to this can sometimes depend on the time period in which it airs; it can depend on the cultural climate. Viewers attempting to jump into this show in 2022, starting with the Season 1 pilot, may never even make it to the gems that exist in the latest collection of episodes. As such, despite Season 1’s admitted quality, it might be best to just skip it. It might be best to just dive right in with Season 2.

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Euphoria Season 1 came into the world at a time when cultural tensions were at a relative simmer, and it seemed designed to pluck at that sizzling string with the goal of provocation. It came across as keenly aware of what the world might think of it too. It had the coolest cast this side of Succession and yet the material seemed to self-consciously act cool, unsure of itself in the way natural to a freshman season of even the best shows.

Maybe it was afraid of being ignored, or - as a show largely centering teenage characters, starring an actress who’d cut her teeth doing fare for kid-oriented TV projects - perhaps it feared not being taken seriously in the big leagues of the Home Box Office. Whatever the cause, Season 1 comes bearing one of the strongest young-adult casts in recent memory, with the key distinction of being ostensibly adult material to work with. Zendaya got to play a dry-witted ham not a far cry from her MJ character in the MCU, a role that likely served as her introduction to older viewers when Spider-Man: Homecoming was released just two years prior. The key difference was that this ham was a defiant, flagrant, irresponsible drug addict.

Jacob Elordi was coming into the show after becoming Netflix-famous in the post-Centineo romantic comedy The Kissing Booth, and was deployed by Euphoria’s first season as an unconscionably toxic boyfriend designed to be hated for how he was written and loved for how he looked. Secret weapons Sydney Sweeney, Hunter Schafer, Barbie Ferreira, and Alexa Demie did not have similarly high internet profiles and so were able to lull the audience more easily into the show’s reality by virtue of seeming to mean absolutely everything they said and did. And what was said and done in their reality was stark indeed. The ordeals these high-school characters went through in the first season were Aronofsky-level emotional and social horrors.

Season 1 is a recital of every kind of assault, every kind of manipulation; if there’s a way a human can be mean to another, some version of it gets dramatized. In 2019, there was an exhilarating sense of revelation about the daring of it, with the knowing wink of having Zendaya as its entry point and narrator. It made pearl-clutching cool again, for those with that propensity, and it made cover stars and clout generating paparazzi magnets of its leads. There were detractors - which tend to be baked right into notoriety - but there was loud praise too, if not of the art (which deserved it), then of the gall (which did deserve it more). Zendaya became the youngest winner of the Emmy for Lead Actress in a Drama for her performance as Rue.

Then there was the pandemic and the production shutdowns that came with it. Euphoria Season 1’s last episode aired in August 2019. If you don’t count the stopgap loosies released before production officially resumed, that’s over two years between its maiden voyage and the January 2022 premiere of Season 2.

It might be considered an understatement to point out that a lot of stuff went down in the real world while the show was away. The cultural catharsis that Season 1 seemed to be antagonizing the audience over not knowing it needed - by rubbing their faces in the bleakest kinds of mutual harm, and using youth as that message’s vector - became an inescapable reality that people did not need or want a TV show to bludgeon them with.

As such (and mercifully), Season 2 kicks off like a Tarantino-cribbing crime caper, the show finally centering the underutilized Angus Cloud as Fez in a series of pulse-pumping scenes designed to suck the viewers into the show’s world and lock them there; it is clear from the jump that the show lost none of its cool while on hiatus, and equally clear that it gained a couple things it didn’t so obviously have the first go-round - a desire to first entertain, and the skillset to do it. To wow the audience with daring choices instead of merely the willingness to cross the line. Episode 5 plays like a Zendaya-starring Safdie Brothers movie. Eric Dane’s multi-episode storyline feels like a reconstructionist Bret Easton Ellis sendup. Backstory from the previous season is filled in with aesthetic flair, telling you all the pertinent information. No previously-ons needed.

There are shots that recreate classic paintings, Dothraki fever dreams, and other welcome flourishes that emphasize storytelling energy and character state of mind, rather than simply adding a poppy sheen to the proceedings. Intimacy gets cranked up in explicitness and complexity, stepping away from a sense of thrill-seeking exploitation toward a sense of frank vitality. The dialogue is often so well-observed and character-specific that one could easily believe the production break was spent, in part, fine-tuning it, to everyone’s benefit. After 2021’s ambitious but tangled Malcolm & Marie, one would be forgiven for not thinking Euphoria creator Sam Levinson even had this in him. It’s like the hostility aimed toward that film (fair or not) put the man into a zone of having something to prove, not just on his own behalf, but on his star/muse’s.

So, gone in Season 2 is the sense of shock for shock’s sake. Even if it’s there—a jaded eye might see such posturing anywhere—but if it is still there, it is there only as flavoring, not as a crutch. For as dark as it gets, there is fun to be had in every episode - knowingly so. There is that teenage misery but the show isn’t drenched in it. Watching Season 1 in 2022 can feel almost Handmaid’s Tale-esque in its desire to inflict what feels like punishment on its characters. You don’t need that. The show doesn’t need that.

Sophomore seasons are often the chance for a series to display what it’s learned about itself from inception to its initial run’s airing. In Euphoria’s case, it seems to have learned to trust itself to make an impression no matter what, since its ingredients are the things the culture couldn’t ignore if it wanted to. Whatever the third season brings, in this moment there isn’t another teen drama currently in its league, by a considerable margin. So don’t look back—and don’t fear what you may have missed—everything you will need to appreciate in this show is present in its current season, and the show seems to know it too.