Shows Like
Shows Like Euphoria Now That It's Over for Good
By Jordan A. · · 5 min read
It's over. Not "on hiatus," not "waiting on schedules." HBO confirmed on May 31, the day the finale aired, that Euphoria had ended after three seasons. Rue got her ending. The glitter is swept up.
Season three was a strange, uneven goodbye. Eight episodes from April 12, a five-year jump that aged everybody into adults with jobs and worse problems, and a visual overhaul: Sam Levinson shot the whole thing on 35mm and 65mm film in CinemaScope, which is why every frame looked like it cost money. Critics were split hard. The score change from Labrinth to Hans Zimmer never worked, and I'll say plainly that the show lost something the second those synths went away. But the cast was never the problem, and Zendaya's Lead Actress nomination this year is deserved.
So now what? The audience for this show splits into two camps, and they need different things.
If it was the look and the sound
We Are Who We Are is the closest match nobody watched. Luca Guadagnino directed all eight episodes about American teenagers on a military base in Italy, and it has the same sun-drunk, hyper-tactile camera and the same refusal to explain its characters to you. Jack Dylan Grazer and Jordan Kristine Seamón are terrific. It's on HBO Max, right where you already are.
Skins is the ancestor. The UK original ran generations of casts through Bristol, and the first two series (Cassie, Sid, Tony, Effy) are the blueprint Euphoria built on: a different character's point of view every episode, a soundtrack doing half the emotional work, adults who are useless. It looks cheap now. It still hits.
I May Destroy You is Michaela Coel's twelve-episode series about a writer piecing together a night she can't remember, and it's the most formally daring thing on this list. Funny in places you don't expect. Devastating in places you do. If Euphoria's honesty about damage is what kept you watching, this is the better version of that.
Betty is the gentle one, two seasons of skater girls in New York shot with the same handheld intimacy and almost none of the misery. Sometimes you want the texture without the trauma.
If it was Rue's story
Dopesick takes the addiction crisis at the source, following Purdue Pharma and a Virginia mining town at the same time. Michael Keaton is the doctor who gets sold, then gets sick. It's an angry show and it should be.
Painkiller covers similar ground on Netflix with Matthew Broderick as Richard Sackler, and it's flashier and less rigorous, but Uzo Aduba's investigator gives it a spine.
Shameless is the long option: eleven seasons in the South Side of Chicago with a family organized entirely around one man's drinking. It's a comedy, mostly. That's what makes the bad episodes land so hard.
And the single best thing Euphoria itself ever made is still there for a rewatch. "Trouble Don't Last Always," the special episode where Rue and Colman Domingo's Ali sit in a diner and talk for an hour, was made during the pandemic with almost no crew, and it's better than most films about recovery. If you only remember the fireworks, go back to that.
If it was the messy ensemble
Elite is the Spanish-language answer, a private school in Madrid where a murder mystery keeps colliding with everyone's love life. It's soapier and more fun than Euphoria and it knows it.
Sex Education is warm where Euphoria is raw, and it still deals frankly with the same subjects. Gillian Anderson as a sex therapist mother is the comic engine. Four seasons, and season two is the peak.
Normal People is twelve half-hours of two Irish kids failing to say the true thing to each other, and Paul Mescal's performance turned into a career overnight. Quieter than anything else here. Just as bruising.
Yellowjackets splits a group of teenage girls between 1996 and now, and it does the thing Euphoria's time jump was reaching for: showing you exactly which teenager each adult used to be. Season one is the strongest, but the cast is stacked all the way through.
Where the cast went
Zendaya is having the wildest year of anyone: she plays Athena in Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, which crossed a billion dollars this summer, and Challengers is the film to watch if you want her doing charm and menace at once. Jacob Elordi went from Saltburn to Frankenstein's creature. Hunter Schafer carried the horror film Cuckoo. Sydney Sweeney has been in roughly everything.
Our Saltburn recommendations are a good next stop if the Elordi lane is the one that appeals.
If season three was too much
Fair. It was a lot. Heartstopper is the antidote: a queer teen romance on Netflix that is kind to its characters at every turn, and it's smarter than the sunny surface suggests. Never Have I Ever handles grief and adolescence with jokes and a Mindy Kaling pace. My Mad Fat Diary is a British series about a girl leaving a psychiatric hospital in 1996, and it does mental health with more warmth and less spectacle than almost anything since.
Where to stream every pick
Euphoria, We Are Who We Are, I May Destroy You and Betty are all on HBO Max. Elite, Sex Education, Painkiller and Heartstopper are on Netflix. Dopesick and Normal People are on Hulu. Shameless moves around between the big three depending on the month, and Yellowjackets is on Paramount+. Skins has bounced between services for years, so check before you commit to an evening.
HBO Max also has the two current shows most likely to scratch the prestige-drama itch while you're there: The Gilded Age, nominated for Outstanding Drama Series this year, and the limited series DTF St. Louis. Neither is Euphoria. Both are very good at what they do.
For more context on why an ending like this one is so rare, our piece on finales that fumble it is the companion read, and the best drama shows of 2026 covers what's replacing it.
Twelve shows, six services, and one very specific mood. That's the exact job BingeNext's TV recommendation engine was built for: tell it Euphoria and one other show you loved, get a ranked shortlist of what's actually streaming for you. It's on the iPhone app too, for when the decision happens on the couch.
Topics covered: euphoria, hbo, zendaya, teen drama, series finale
About the author
Jordan A., Founder, BingeNext
Jordan A. is the founder of BingeNext and writes every guide on this site. He built the recommendation engine after one too many nights lost to the streaming menu, and he still tests every pick the hard way: by watching it.