I’m deputy editor at The Ankler and co-host of the Prestige Junkie podcast. My Art & Crafts series this week celebrates the Emmy-nominated artisans behind top shows — including casting, cinematography and music.
On HBO’s Euphoria, editing is a team sport.
“It’s very different than most TV shows,” says editor Aaron I. Butler, one of five editors nominated for the show’s series finale this year.
Different, it turns out, works. While most shows typically credit one or two editors per episode, Euphoria has gone the group route to great success. In 2022, Sam Levinson‘s hit series won best editing for a drama for Butler, Nikola Boyanov, Laura Zempel and supervising editor Julio C. Perez IV. This year, Butler, Boyanov and Perez are returning to the race alongside newcomers Aleshka Ferrero (who worked with Levinson on The Idol) and additional editor Kristin Valentine.
Perez, who was also a producer on the show, served as the group’s leader and was the “connective tissue” holding the pieces together, says Butler. “He’ll assign out scenes, or sometimes we’ll choose. We work individually on those, but then we come together.”
Perez provided notes to everyone during the process, and the group engaged in a deep collaborative relationship, watching edits and providing feedback even during lunch hour.
“We’re all really in this together, and I think that’s unusual for a TV show,” he says.
The group is nominated for the series finale, “In God We Trust,” a 93-minute sendoff that leaves multiple characters dead — including Zendaya’s Rue, the show’s lead figure — and ties together several storylines.
“We knew we had to be very deliberate about realizing what Sam had written, and perhaps if we’re having a good day, enhancing his vision,” Perez says. “There was an added level of emotional urgency in working on the finale. You feel it, you know it. But from a fundamental professional level, it was the same as other episodes. It just has this extra resonance and meaning.”
In keeping with the group’s collaborative spirit, every editor had a hand in one of the finale’s major moments: Boyanov edited a thrilling sequence at the start of the episode when Rue — embroiled in a drug war between rival dealers Alamo (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) and Laurie (Martha Kelly) — is chased down by a man on horseback; Butler handled a final shootout between Alamo and Ali (Colman Domingo) that built tension like the best Sergio Leone spaghetti Western; Ferrero stepped up to take Rue’s tragic death scene following an accidental overdose; and Perez was responsible for the show’s final scene. For the giant drug raid that happens at Laurie’s hideout, all four editors worked in unison.
“We’re feeding off each other’s work and energy, and that’s what’s so satisfying about the team and how we do things,” Ferrero says. “But I did feel a little extra responsibility in this one.”
Ferrero knew Rue’s death scene had to be perfect. In the episode, Rue’s accidental overdose plays out like a dream sequence — while watching TV at Ali’s apartment, Rue sees that her longtime friend Fezco (Angus Cloud, who died of an accidental overdose in 2023) has escaped jail. She runs to meet him, bolting past law enforcement officers and finally coming face-to-face with her estranged mother, Leslie (Nika King). It’s then that the audience knows what’s happening isn’t part of the show’s actual narrative, but a manifestation of her final moments.
“We have the advantage that Euphoria is already a show that over the years has taken all these poetic licenses and goes into flights of fancy,” she says of the sequence’s initial subterfuge. “As you’re watching it, you feel something is off, but you go along with the ride. And so the trick was how do we make it feel real, but add in surreal flourishes.” To do so, Ferrero included flashbacks of Rue seeing her former girlfriend, Jules (Hunter Schafer), in a car from the pilot episode, while Perez and Levinson pulled unused footage of Zendaya and Cloud from the first season to give those characters one more moment together. “That was a late addition,” Ferrero says, of the emotional reunion. “When I saw that, I was like, ‘That’s the cherry on top. That’s perfect.’”
Wedding Party
Emmy-winning editor Joanna Naugle is still getting used to her time on FX’s hit The Bear being over.
“The thing that I love about working on The Bear, or loved — oh my gosh, that sounds so sad — is that every season is so different,” she says, days after the show’s final season premiered. “We really try to reinvent things and not just do the same exact thing over and over again.”
Thus far, Naugle has been nominated for every season of The Bear, including this year for last summer’s fourth season; the final season, released by FX in June, is eligible for Emmy recognition next year.
But whatever happens with the show’s awards fate in the future, Naugle is just thrilled the Television Academy nominated her for season four’s “Bears.” Written by co-showrunner Joanna Calo and directed by co-showrunner and creator Christopher Storer, the 70-minute, star-packed episode reveals the best of the complicated Berzatto family at the core of The Bear, a shift from the dynamics the show had typically explored to that point.
Even better, “Bears” — set during the wedding party of Tiff (Gillian Jacobs), the ex-wife of Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), and Frank (Josh Hartnett) — perfectly bookends the traumatic season two episode, “Fishes,” which won Naugle her second Emmy.
“In ‘Fishes,’ we have all these people together, all these big personalities, and it kind of goes off the rails, and everything is horrible,” she says of the major season two episode, which first introduced several key members of the Berzatto family, including Jamie-Lee Curtis’ complicated matriarch, Donna. “So then when all these people are back together in season four, you’re like, ‘Oh my god, it’s going to be a disaster,’ and then it ends up being this really fun, happy, warm ending.” It was really fun to try to build the same tension between the two episodes, but have a completely different outcome.”
Echoes to “Fishes” happen several times in “Bears”; an early conversation at the reception between Tiff and Michelle (Sarah Paulson) about Tiff’s mother matches a “Fishes” scene where Tiff and Richie discuss her pregnancy. In “Fishes,” everything culminates with a big shouting match at the dinner table; in “Bears,” everyone in the Berzatto clan and its extended family have a loving and thoughtful discussion under a dinner table.
“I really tried to build those the same way with a lot of reaction shots,” Naugle says of the table scenes that close each episode. “There’s a lot more listening and understanding in those reaction shots in ‘Bears’ compared to ‘Fishes.’ In ‘Fishes,’ everyone’s just kind of like watching a car crash — literally, since Donna crashes her car into the house — and figuratively. In the wedding episode, it’s like, ‘Oh, people are really empathizing with each other and seeing a different side of each other.’”
Even counting the final season, “Bears” is the starriest episode of The Bear. Guest actors include Paulson, Jacobs, Curtis, Hartnett, Bob Odenkirk, John Mulaney and even Brie Larson, as a long-discussed former friend of Abby Elliott’s character, Sugar. Naugle’s task was to allow each of those guests to have moments to shine, while leaving room for big contributions from the show’s stars, Moss-Bachrach, Jeremy Allen White and Ayo Edebiri.
“The great thing about working on the show for so many seasons is that the sense of humor just comes from knowing the characters so well, so you almost don’t need to do so much in terms of setup and punchline,” she says. “It’s more so like, ‘Oh, of course, Richie would behave like this. Of course Sydney (Edebiri’s character) is having this reaction to this circumstance.’ So I feel like I can still cut the characters in a similar way, and the humor just comes from knowing them so well and seeing them in a different environment.”
