By the time the credits rolled on Euphoria’s Season 3 penultimate episode, the group chats had already ignited. The scene in question — the death of Nate Jacobs, the menacing antihero played by Jacob Elordi across the show’s first two seasons — landed hard enough to send “Euphoria” trending before most of the East Coast had finished their episode.
Now Sam Levinson, the show’s creator and the figure who has weathered every cycle of Euphoria discourse since HBO debuted the series in 2019, is weighing in on the backlash. In remarks reported by Page Six on May 25, Levinson pushed back on the suggestion that the scene’s brutality reflected something troubling in the writer’s room. “Not all dark scenes come from a dark place,” he said, framing the moment as a considered creative choice rather than provocation for its own sake.
Nate Jacobs was never an easy character to love — or to look away from. The Port Canaveral patriarch’s son spent two seasons functioning as a kind of blunt-force engine for the show’s most volatile storylines, and his exit, described widely by viewers as “horrific,” fits squarely within Euphoria’s established grammar of consequence.
Season 3 has been a long time coming. Production delays, reported creative friction, and a revolving cast conversation made it one of the more scrutinized returns in recent prestige-TV memory. Levinson’s comments are unlikely to close the debate — the finale is still to come, and the internet is already positioned.