I Watched The Original Israeli Show That Inspired Euphoria. Here’s How It Goes

There is a place in South America called Miranda El Cielo. Nobody knows exactly where it is. To reach it, you must travel "the way of death." The legend goes that it is a sanctuary, a place where the broken go to be made whole again.

Sixteen-year-old Ra'anan tells his best friend Kino about it on the night someone runs him over with a car outside a club. By the end of the Israeli teen drama that inspired HBO's Euphoria, a group of traumatised teenagers are actively planning to cross the Mediterranean on a stolen boat to fly to this place from Europe. Some are caught, some turn back, almost nobody makes it.

There is a story from medieval Europe I can't help thinking about as I watched the Hot3's Euphoria that aired in Israel from 2012 to 2013. This is, more or less, the plot of the 1212 Children's Crusade, in which tens of thousands of children marched south across Europe, convinced the Mediterranean would part for them, and that they would walk peacefully into Jerusalem and do what a century of official crusades had failed to do. At the Italian coast, they were met not by parted waters but by sailors who offered them passage, and then sold them as slaves in Tunisia.

Sam Levinson, too, probably thought of the same story as he watched it: the first two seasons of his adaptation became a Skins remake, and the last one became a season of what happens when the children reach Tunisia and are sold by the friendly-looking sailors (hi, Laurie!).

After hours of sailing the internet, I found the original show that inspired Sam Levinson's Euphoria and gave it a watch. Below is everything that happens, and why it makes the HBO version look like a Disneyland. Read on.

Turns Out, The Original Euphoria Was Based On A Real Incident

The original show, a ten-episode miniseries on Israeli cable network Hot3, was inspired by the 2004 murder of eighteen-year-old Ra'anan Levy outside a club in Netanya (you see where this is going). Levy had struck up a conversation with a girl while waiting to get in, not knowing she had a boyfriend. Said boyfriend called in friends from the city's underworld, and Levy was killed.

The 2012 show fictionalises the aftermath of the murder. In a flashback in episode four, Hofit (the Rue of this version) is out on a date with Yizhar at a club called Titanic. Yizhar gets drunk and abandons her. Hofit meets two boys, Kino and Ra'anan, and is flirting with the latter when Dekar (a Fezco equivalent, long carrying a crush on Hofit) spots them. Out of jealousy, Dekar taunts Yizhar, and in a rage, Yizhar runs Ra'anan down with his car and kills him.

The show picks up a year later, following the teens who were at the Titanic that night. One by one, they give up on their lives and abandon their families, until all of them end up under the same roof: Kino's apartment, planning to reach Mirando el Cielo.

Similarities With The HBO Show… And The Differences

So, let’s just start by saying that Maddie and Cassie don’t exist at all in this version. It’s a bleaker look at teenage life on the fringes of society, and topics like friendship or hooking up with your best friend's boyfriend are too… tame for what you end up seeing here (more on that soon).

Rue (or Hofit, as she's called here) is more of a Serena van der Woodsen figure: the life of the party with loving parents, who slips into addiction and self-harm after the Titanic. By the time the show begins, she has left home to live with Kino, Ra'anan's best friend, who has since slipped into depression and sleeps twenty hours a day.

The closest character to the HBO version is Noy (this show's Kat): a plus-sized girl who has sex with strangers she meets online to improve her relationship with her body. Unlike her American counterpart, who escapes with only a failed relationship, Noy's story ends with an HIV diagnosis.

Now for interesting parts: remember Fezco’s brother, the kid, Ashtray? Here, he is Tomeriko - an eleven-year-old who is swayed by the 2010s rush for content creation that once made being a YouTuber every second kid’s dream job. Tomeriko opens a channel with Dekar (Fezco) and Hofit teaching about drugs and hallucinogens. As his subscribers increase, he is compelled to make his videos more extreme, all the way from recording – wait for it – a failed lobotomy on Dekar to livestreaming himself murdering Yizhar in cold blood.

Elkana (Nate) is a wanted IDF deserter who spends his days trying new recipes and meeting women online. He begins as the group's resident misogynist and ends as its reluctant protector, trying to shield his brothers from hypermasculine preachers on the internet (the HBO Nate was probably supposed to end up the way he did then, who knows?)

Speaking of siblings, one of Elkana’s brothers is Heppy, the antithesis of Sam Levinson's Lexi: : a struggling actor on a show called Our Life (remember Lexi's play?) and a porn addict who, after a failed affair with his laundrywoman, acquires a fuckdoll and introduces it as his girlfriend in interviews.

The youngest brother in the trio is Dekar (Fezco, as you know by now), a science nerd who makes drugs at home for Hofit (Rue). Dekar initially starts out as a more understanding, sensitive fifteen-year-old. However, he spirals into pre-manosphere internet rabbit holes after she rejects him, performing brain surgery on himself to change his personality, and when that fails, rapes her before enlisting in the IDF.

Rounding out the group are Uriel, a gay drifter who fled his homophobic parents; Dudu, the aspiring veterinarian who operates on Dekar; and Shuki, Tomeriko's older brother and Uriel's IDF supervisor, who subjects Uriel to conversion therapy.

What About The Cinematography?

HBO's Euphoria set a visual benchmark that became a standard for many movies to follow, from the Russo brothers' Cherry to Emerald Fennell's Saltburn. The original version offers none of that. Shot like a standard cable drama, it is competent and unremarkable, and the colour palette is muted and grey throughout to match the mood of the show. The one exception is the Titanic flashback episode, which breaks the grey with streaks of purple and blue.

Then there are Kino's dreams: a subplot set in a saturated, overgrown Amazonian rainforest, where he and Ra'anan search for a place called "mirando el cielo." Since Ra'anan's death, Kino sleeps all day to come back to his dream, freed out of it only at the end, when a fire in his house forces him to leave the room. By the time the how ends, we realise that Mirando el Cielo is an idiom for dying, and so the people planning to cross the sea would end up going nowhere.

Where Are The Parents? What About School?

Unlike Euphoria, where we still see adults stepping up in moments where it becomes too much, grown-ups here are either completely absent, or glimpsed at angles, partially framed, shot from behind. None of the characters go to school anymore. Adults arrive in full only at moments of rupture, such as when the IDF takes Elkana away in the end, and when Heppy is framed for Yizhar's murder and arrested.

For All Its Faults, It Was Way Ahead Of Its Time

There's a weird sense of deja vu watching this show in 2026. Sure, the first half is a drag; you can't care about most of the characters till episode six; the soundtrack doesn't stand out; the show only has its cast's acting skills going for it, but not once is this show a dismissive portrayal of what the internet calls Gen Z culture.

The original Euphoria aired in 2012: two years before GamerGate, four years before "incel" entered mainstream usage, seven years before Instagram's research around teenage users made the discourse around social media and teenage mental health unavoidable.

Yet, when you hear the theories Elkana has about women's relationship with sex (modern manosphere gurus name it hoeflation), or watch Dekar talk about evolution and improving himself beyond what's possible, you wonder if the first people who watched the show ever realised they were watching a ticking time bomb: the thing it was warning about arrived anyway, more or less exactly as described, and almost nobody saw the warning.

It makes you wonder if the warnings ever matter, if the audience just keeps deciding they are fiction.