The creator of the HBO series, whose third and final season concluded last month, pushed back against sustained criticism over the show’s depiction of Sydney Sweeney’s character Cassie turning to OnlyFans to fund a $50,000 wedding. Levinson told Maher he took a “fairly critical look” at OnlyFans culture and chose not to portray it as empowering.
His argument was framed around scale and consequence. “If you look at OnlyFans, it is making as much money as Hollywood. I mean, essentially it’s on par,” he said. “It’s not a niche business, it is a massive enterprise. And so if you’re young, you’re going, ‘I don’t want to go work in a 9-to-5.'”
He continued: “The question is, what are the long-term consequences of that? What happens when you’re on Instagram and you’re told that you’re the product, you’re the brand, and now you’re 18 years old?” He described the storyline as an exploration of “fast cash” and its human cost, saying OnlyFans culture “hollows out the individual” through dependence on external validation and likes.
The backlash Levinson was addressing had been building since May, when season three depicted Cassie creating increasingly extreme content — including scenes of her dressed in a diaper and pacifier. Real OnlyFans creators were pointed in their objections. Maitland Ward, a top creator who previously starred on Boy Meets World, described the baby costume as particularly damaging.
“In the climate we’re in, that they dressed her up as a baby to make pornographic OnlyFans content was beyond troubling,” she said, adding the show treats sex work as a punchline. Creator Sydney Leathers called the portrayal “ridiculous and cartoonish,” noting that age-play content is explicitly banned by OnlyFans due to credit card processor rules that are “getting stricter all the time.”
Critics also challenged the storyline’s economic premise — that an attractive young woman can generate a fortune overnight simply by posing under a ring light. Prominent creator Alix Lynx described this “easy money” framing as a myth, arguing that building a subscriber base requires months or years of strategic marketing work that the show skipped entirely in favor of spectacle.
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Levinson, for his part, raised the question of whether the criticism would have landed differently had Euphoria celebrated OnlyFans rather than condemned it. As Maher called Maddy — who manages Cassie’s content career — the season’s “moral center,” Levinson described the dynamic as “a whole new industry.
It’s sort of light pimping.” Chloe Cherry, who worked in adult film and on OnlyFans before joining Euphoria as a cast member, said she found Cassie’s arc “crazy as fuck” given the character’s privilege, adding that sex work is being normalized “only because of capitalism and the economy getting worse,” and “has nothing to do with empowerment.”
