You’ve been trying to find East Highland on Google Maps. It’s not there. Stop looking.

Key Facts 

Detail	Reality
Fictional Setting	East Highland, Southern California
Real Filming Hub	Los Angeles County + Sony Pictures Studios, Culver City
High School Exterior	Ulysses S. Grant High School, Valley Glen
State Hinted At	California (never confirmed on-screen)
Creator’s Inspiration	Sam Levinson’s LA upbringing + personal addiction history
Seasons	3 (2019–2026)
Network	HBO

Here’s something that’ll mess with your head a little. One of the most visually specific shows on television — every frame soaked in neon, every suburb feeling hyper-real — is set in a town that flat-out does not exist. No zip code. No city council. No Yelp reviews for Fez’s convenience store.

East Highland is fiction. Total, deliberate fiction.

And the fact that millions of people never questioned it? That tells you everything about how good this show is at manufacturing a sense of place without actually having one.

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So Where Is East Highland, Really?

The characters of Euphoria go to East Highland High School. They hang at a corner store. They throw parties in houses that look like every other beige-stucco California suburb you’ve ever driven through. Rue even describes her upbringing as “a middle-class childhood in an American suburb.” That’s it. That’s the geography lesson.

No state. No zip code. No landmark that pins it down.

But if you pay attention — really pay attention — the show leaks clues all over the place. There’s no snow. Not even in Season 2, which runs through the dead of winter. That alone rules out pretty much three-quarters of the country. Then there’s the beach scene in the special episode where Jules stands at the water’s edge. Mountains visible from certain angles. Palm trees everywhere. Dry heat radiating off every parking lot.

<span style=”font-weight:bold;”>Southern California. The evidence is overwhelming.</span>

Sam Levinson — who created the show and wrote almost every episode himself — grew up in Los Angeles. He’s spoken about spending his teenage years cycling through hospitals and rehab facilities across the city. He spent years addicted to opiates as a kid, which is probably why Rue’s addiction feels less like a TV storyline and more like something someone actually survived.

The town he built for this show is the town he grew up in. Just with the street signs removed.

The Real Locations Are Hiding in Plain Sight

Here’s where it gets interesting for anyone who’s obsessed enough to track this down.

The school you’ve been watching for three seasons? That’s Ulysses S. Grant High School in Valley Glen, Los Angeles. Exterior only — they shot all the hallways, classrooms, and auditorium interiors on a sound stage at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City. The rotating room from the pilot episode? Built on a gimbal. No CGI. Practical, expensive, insane filmmaking.

Grant High has been in Clueless, Saved by the Bell, Freaks and Geeks, and about a dozen other shows. In essence, it’s Hollywood’s preferred “generic American high school” setting. But Euphoria made it feel singular. That’s the craft of it.

Fez’s convenience store? A real defunct Alta Dena Dairy location sitting at 9201 East Las Tunas Drive in Temple City. The drug dealing front that half the fandom spent two seasons stressed about — a real building you can still drive past today.

The diner where Rue has her heavy conversations with Ali? Pann’s Restaurant on La Tijera Boulevard in LA. Classic Googie architecture. Looks like it was pulled straight from 1958. That choice was not accidental.

Bowlium Lanes in Montclair — the bowling alley that gave us one of Season 2’s most weirdly beautiful scenes — is a 32-lane relic from 1957 that still runs cosmic bowling nights on weekends. Season 3 expanded the geography hard, pulling in locations from the Mojave Desert, Warner Bros.’ studio lot in Burbank, Huntington Park (dressed up to pass for Mexico), and even downtown LA’s Union Station for that isolating train platform sequence.

The show isn’t set in one place. It’s stitched together from pieces of a city that was too sprawling and too complicated to capture any other way.

Why Make It Fake? The Creative Logic Here Is Actually Smart

People often assume keeping the location vague is lazy writing. It’s not. It’s a deliberate choice with real creative stakes.

When you anchor a show to a specific real town, you inherit that town’s baggage. The audience starts fact-checking. “That’s not how that neighborhood feels.” “People don’t talk like that there.” It limits the story before the first scene even plays.

By inventing East Highland, Levinson got to build a suburb with its own rules. The setting could be everywhere simultaneously. The drug problems. The economic anxiety underneath the manicured lawns. The social media performance anxiety shapes every interaction. These things aren’t specific to one California zip code. They’re everywhere. And keeping the address blank lets the audience project their own hometown onto it.

There’s a real place in San Bernardino County called East Highland, by the way. When the show went viral, people feverishly searched for it on Google. It’s desert terrain and strip malls. Looks nothing like the show. Dead end.

The name “East Highland” itself might be a nod to both East LA and Highland Park — two neighborhoods with their own distinct Los Angeles histories. Levinson hasn’t confirmed that either. He’s not the type to over-explain.

Season 3 Changed Everything About the “Where”

By the time Season 3 arrived in 2026, the show had outgrown the high school entirely. Five years jump-cut forward. The characters scattered. Maddy and Lexi in proper Los Angeles. Nate and Cassie drifting toward the Orange County bubble.

Levinson flat-out said he didn’t want to go back to the same town or the same school. The visual language shifted too. Season 3 was shot on 65mm film and Ektachrome 35mm — a format Kodak doesn’t even mass-produce anymore. Levinson apparently offered to buy a million feet of it just to get the show made that way. That’s not a budget conversation. That’s an obsession.

The Mojave Desert showed up. Broad, expansive views of California that resembled a Leone Western rather than a juvenile drama. Which was the point — Levinson described adulthood as “the wild west” and let the landscape say it for him.

The setting stopped being suburban and started being the whole state.

What the Setting Is Actually Doing Thematically

Okay, this is the part most people skip over when they’re too focused on tracking down filming addresses.

East Highland isn’t just a backdrop. The town, this sun-bleached, warm, and always lovely suburb, is acting as a visual deception. Everything looks fine. The houses are fine. The weather is gorgeous. The school has a football team and a drama department and lockers with little stickers on them.

And under all of it: addiction eating people alive, families fracturing quietly, kids dissociating behind social media performance, trauma compounding trauma with zero adequate support systems.

The suburb is the point. The prettiness is the lie Euphoria keeps interrogating. Any city would’ve looked too gritty, too honest. This had to appear to be a place where things should be alright.  That contrast is what the whole show runs on.

Final Thoughts

Look. You can spend time finding every real California address that made it onto the show. And that’s fun. If you’re ever in LA, it’s worthwhile.

But the deeper reason East Highland feels so real to people who’ve never been to Southern California is that Levinson made it feel universal on purpose. That specific kind of American suburb — beautiful from the outside, hollowed out in ways nobody talks about — exists in Ohio. In Florida. In Texas. In suburban England.

The address doesn’t matter. You already know this town.

You grew up there, or someone you know did, or you drove through it once and felt that specific kind of existential dread you couldn’t explain at a gas station off the highway.

East Highland is everywhere. That’s the whole trick.

FAQs

1. Is East Highland a real city? 

No. Completely fictional. There’s a place called East Highland in San Bernardino County, California, but it’s desert suburbs and has nothing to do with the show.

2. What state does Euphoria take place in? 

Never officially stated on screen. Everything points to Southern California — the weather, the palm trees, the coastal access, the filming locations — but Levinson never confirmed it directly.

3. Where was Euphoria actually filmed? 

Primarily in and around Los Angeles County: Van Nuys, Temple City, Culver City, Montclair, Burbank, Torrance, and Inglewood. Most interiors were built at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City.

4. What high school does Euphoria use? 

Ulysses S. Grant High School in Valley Glen, Los Angeles, serves as East Highland High for all exterior shots. It’s also been in Clueless, Saved by the Bell, Ferris Bueller, and Freaks and Geeks.

5. Why did Sam Levinson choose a fictional location? 

Most likely to keep the story universal — the issues the characters face (addiction, identity, trauma, class anxiety) aren’t specific to any one town. A fake setting prevents geographic distraction.

6. Can fans actually visit Euphoria filming locations? 

Yes. Grant High School, Bowlium Lanes in Montclair, Pann’s Restaurant in LA, Del Amo Fashion Center in Torrance, and the former Alta Dena Dairy in Temple City are all accessible to the public.

7. Where did Season 3 film? 

Expanded significantly across Southern California, including the Mojave Desert, Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, Huntington Park, the San Fernando Valley, and multiple LA landmarks including Union Station.

8. Is Euphoria based on a real show? 

Yes — it’s adapted from an Israeli series of the same name created by Ron Leshem. Sam Levinson bought the rights and relocated the story to America, drawing heavily from his own teenage experiences in Los Angeles.

9. Why do some people think Euphoria is set in Florida? 

Tampa gets mentioned early in Season 1, and the show has frequent rain and palm trees. But mountains appear in other shots, which rules out Florida entirely. It’s Southern California.

10. Did Levinson grow up in the setting he created? 

Sort of. He grew up in Los Angeles and spent much of his teenage years in hospitals and rehab facilities around the city after struggling with opiate addiction. East Highland is a fictionalized, idealized-then-destroyed version of that landscape.

11. Does the show ever specifically say “California”? 

No. The characters reference the Santa Monica Pier indirectly, there are coastal scenes, and the production is unmistakably Californian — but the word never appears on screen as confirmed canon.

12. Is the name “East Highland” meaningful? 

Possibly a nod to East LA and Highland Park, two Los Angeles neighborhoods with distinct working-class histories. Levinson hasn’t confirmed this. The ambiguity seems intentional.

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