Is Jules On Euphoria Or The Cancelled Gossip Girl Reboot?

Contrary to what critics are saying, my hot take about Euphoria is that Season 3 is actually... really good. But there’s no denying that it has a bit of an identity crisis. As many people on social media pointed out, it feels like the cast is on completely different shows. And for Hunter Schafer’s Jules, that show is specifically the Gossip Girl reboot.

Jules didn’t appear in the season premiere beyond Lexi’s eyebrow-raising mention. But from the moment she graced our screens, it felt like she had been hanging out in the elite circles of New York, even though she’s living and (kind of) working in Los Angeles like all of her former high school peers.

Five years after graduation, Zendaya’s Rue reconnects with Jules after learning that she’s become a sugar baby, a storyline that I’m surprised the Gossip Girl reboot didn’t explore (unless you count Nate’s affinity for older women in the original show).

She follows Jules to her new digs, an upscale high-rise loft with floor-to-ceiling windows and a view of the downtown skyline, which invokes the immaculate penthouses that today’s version of Constance Billard students live in, putting Blair Waldorf’s iconic townhouse to shame.

In true Serena van der Woodsen fashion, Jules believes her dynamic with her sugar daddy is an actual relationship that isn’t secretive or transactional — and that his wife is fine with, which is something that the reboot’s Audrey may also think. And like any reasonable person (say, a Julien or Zoya), Rue questioned this immediately.

Since then, Jules has been living her best sugar-baby life, upstaging everyone at Nate and Cassie’s wedding in a revenge dress, painting genitals for a TV show, and pretending to work while drinking wine in bed and watching Love Island, which feels like the default mode for many Constance Billard students on the reboot. Even her catch-ups with Rue feel reminiscent of Gossip Girl, casually eating Chinese takeout in her lavish loft and dancing around their feelings before she seduces her anyway.

While Jules is living in this Gossip Girl-esque alternate universe, Rue and Nate are battling for their lives, Maddy is pimping out Cassie on OnlyFans, and Lexi is judging them all for their choices, which makes the difference in tone even more apparent. That said, it wouldn’t be Gossip Girl without making everyone’s lives even more complicated, and from the look of the fifth episode, that’s exactly what’s about to happen for Jules.