HBO Euphoria, Max’s hit dark drama, explores the complicated world of high school teenagers in California, but the exact location is a bit hazy.
Since its premiere in 2019, HBO Max’s hit drama Euphoria has been a hot topic in pop culture. Fans were overjoyed to see Season 2 premiere on the streaming platform in January 2022, after waiting nearly three years for the highly anticipated follow-up to the highly successful first season. Euphoria’s sophomore season did not disappoint, with just as much trauma, drama, and drugs as the first.
Rue has a troubled past, turning to heavy narcotics use to cope with the untimely death of her father. Rue is not the most reliable narrator because she is inebriated for the majority of both seasons of the show, and her recollection of events may be skewed due to her not being in the right frame of mind while certain major plots were taking place. This could also be applied to the setting of Euphoria, where Rue gives only a few, hazy details about her hometown, leaving viewers to piece together the puzzle.
Rue mentions in Season 1 that she had a “middle-class childhood in an American suburb,” though it’s clear that this suburb is somewhere in Los Angeles County’s more rural areas. The majority of Euphoria was shot at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City, California, and it’s clear that the cinematic team chose to film parts of the series in Burbank, Montclair, and other parts of Los Angeles for other on-location shots. This is most likely to keep the locations looking as seamless as possible while also saving money on the production costs of shooting in multiple locations across the country.
Many fans of Euphoria have deduced the show’s setting from the name of the high school that all of the young characters attend. Though all of the scenes set inside the school were shot at Valley Glen’s Ulysses S. Grant High School, the school in Euphoria is known as “East Highland High School,” leading many fans to believe it is named after the town in which the series is set. Ulysses S. Grant High School has appeared in films and television shows such as MTV’s Teen Wolf reboot, Malcolm in the Middle, and Not Another Teen Movie.
Though East Highland is never officially spoken as the town’s name, it’s not a huge leap, and Euphoria creator Sam Levinson has neither confirmed nor denied this theory, making it less of a theory and more of a fact in the Euphoria universe. Is East Highland a real California town? No, is the short answer. However, there is a city called Highland in San Bernadino County that is divided into two parts: Highland and East Highland, though a quick search on Google Maps reveals it’s more desert terrain than anything else — and definitely not the same location as Euphoria.
