'The Idol' Is Train Wreck Television
That said, nepo baby royalty Lily-Rose Depp does a good job given the circumstances!
In the event that you are someone who deems The Idol a show that can be spoiled: this newsletter contains spoilers for the first two episodes of The Idol.
If the newly christened MAX is on a mission to make us forget everything its old namesake HBO once stood for — prestige television, general excellence, enjoyable viewing — it seems to be succeeding with The Idol.
Running in Succession’s old Sunday night time slot, this show offers an entirely different kind of wealth porn, where everyone is tacky on purpose. However the protagonist, a popstar named Jocelyn played by Chanel face and noted nepo baby Lily-Rose Depp, isn’t Succession-rich — her house isn’t the is-that-an-office-building-or-house sort of thing that dangles over the Pacific Ocean. It’s more like the regular sort of Bel-Air mansion that has two pools.
But it’s hard to enjoy the sets and clothes since the show is such a terrific and upsetting disaster. The Idol gazes into Jocelyn’s world, where everyone is, you know, bad, and thus parties by drinking clear liquor straight-up out of glass tumblers. She’s on the brink of a career comeback following a psychotic break, stemming from losing her mom to cancer a year earlier but also the particular misery of being a beautiful, famous, twenty-something music star who keeps her best friend on her payroll and finds herself surrounded by lackies and leeches who thrill at both objectifying and diminishing her.
I am tempted to describe the show as joyless, however a fair amount of joy is being derived across the internet from people delighting in just how silly it is, which is what piqued my interest enough to view the first two episodes. The show is set to be one of those things, like Showgirls or Glitter, that comes in last in the race for critical acclaim, but crosses the finish line head held aloft because it has simply won attention. And, probably, a real group of fans who appreciate it ironically.
The New York Post’s Page Six has developed a sub-beat out of trashing The Idol. Depp has “the best agent in Hollywood,” one such story reports, adding, that her role on the show — “featuring scenes that have been described as ‘comically bad’ and ‘torture porn’ — has got industry insiders hoping it won’t derail her career.” Do you hear that sound? That’s the sound of at least thousands of people clicking open Max to see what Page Six means, exactly, by “comically bad.”
I agree with criticism that the show’s sex scenes are awful in every sense. Page Six went with the headline: “Fans horrified by ‘X-rated’ sex scene in ‘The Idol’: ‘I lost respect for The Weeknd.’” And The Guardian: “Nauseating, hateful TV: how The Idol has single-handedly resurrected torture porn.”
But the sex scenes aren’t that surprising given how gratuitous every frame of this show is. Plus, as New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg noted, “To write about ‘The Idol’ at all is to fall into a bit of a trap, because the show desperately wants to be a scandal.”
An early promo filled with frenetic shots of cocaine and underboob boasted the show came courtesy of “the sick and twisted minds of Sam Levinson and The Weeknd.” Levinson created Euphoria, and was brought onto The Idol for a creative overhaul after much of it had already been shot under the direction of The Girlfriend Experience’s Amy Seimetz. (Levinson, 38, is a nepo baby himself; his dad Barry Levinson’s resume includes winning an Academy Award for directing 1988’s Rain Man starring Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise.) Reports about this must have been what inspired Rolling Stone to investigate what exactly was going on with this hot mess of a show. That story published in March under the tag “PRODUCTION HELL” with the headline, “‘The Idol’: How HBO’s Next ‘Euphoria’ Became Twisted ‘Torture Porn.’” The piece, which is juicy and nicely reported, explains that Seimetz had to work with “half-finished scripts,” plus a first-time showrunner, plus, well, The Weeknd. Not only is his performance as cult leader-slash-nightclub owner named Tedros peak cringe, his alleged behind-the-scenes influence is, too.
The Weeknd is a co-creator of the show and was reported by Deadline to have been unhappy that under Seimetz, The Idol had too much of a “female perspective.” Rolling Stone corroborated a report that he was displeased that the show focused on Depp’s character resulting in a “feminist lens” he wanted to drop. One source told Rolling Stone, “It was like the Weeknd wanted one show that was all about him — Sam was on board with that.”
The rewrites were, another person said, “like sexual torture porn.” Scrapped scenes included one where Depp would carry an egg in her vagina and if she dropped it, Tedros would refuse to “rape” her, resulting in her begging him to “rape” her.
So basically we could have gotten a show that was “a dark satire of fame and the fame model in the 21st century” directed by Seimetz, as one production person described it. But what we got instead, seemingly owing to The Weeknd, Levinson, and Max executives, is a show that is now pretending it wanted to be the clickbait it has become all along. “When my wife read me the [Rolling Stone] article,” Levinson told the New York Times, “I looked at her and said, ‘I think we’re about to have the biggest show of the summer.’”
I get it, all press is good press, but this show is still a mess. It’s almost as if a group of male executives decided the best way to compete with TikTok was to mash a bunch of clicky terms together (cults! sex! pop stars! breasts! nepo babies!) then throw between $54 and $75 million at turning it into television. Plot points include a photo of Jocelyn with semen on her face winding up on the internet, about which a Live Nation executive quips, “How are 14-year-old girls going to buy tickets to this when she’s frosted like a Pop Tart?” Jocelyn’s friend remarks of Tedros, “I hate his vibe!” And, “He’s so rapey!” As if, what, viewers might not get that?
One of the sex scenes involves The Weeknd throwing Jocelyn’s red satin robe over her head, tying the sash around her neck, then using a knife to cut a hole where her mouth is. The imaginative dialogue we are treated to here is, “Do you trust me?” He then cuts her inner thighs and the marks have to be concealed with makeup before a music video shoot. But the second episode’s sexual encounter, where The Weeknd dirty talks Jocelyn in scenes that will follow him around the internet for the rest of his life, resulted in headlines like Page Six’s, “‘The Idol’ episode with ‘worst sex scene in history’ loses more than 100K viewers.”
The Idol seems unlikely to ruin Lily-Rose Depp’s career. In fact, it will probably do the opposite. She has emerged from that Elle interview — where asked about nepotism, she said “nothing is going to get you the part except for being right for the part” — like a phoenix rising from the purgatory of regrettable soundbites. When people think about her, they’ll think about how astoundingly unfortunate the show is and how her team really should have steered her to a better project before they remember that she said that. Plus, unlike The Weeknd, she shows range and can act! Media reports have in no way blamed her for the terrible script. If her Instagram comment on Saturday Night Live star Chloe Fineman’s parody of the show is any indication, she has a sense of humor about how ridiculous it all is. (Watching two episodes was worth it if only to enjoy the parodies.)
Hilariously, the show in all its badness also serves as a Chanel ad, as Depp seems to have been filmed with the intention of making the brand’s logo visible on her sunglasses. You might think “torture porn” would not be the sort of adjacency Chanel is looking for, especially now that it’s charging $10,000 for handbags that used to cost less than $5,000. But after that wild L.A. resort show, maybe all bets are off! Maybe Tedros or Jocelyn are the perfect use case for the shiny track suit in the blue shade that fashion critic Cathy Horyn called “ghastly.” Maybe that collection makes sense after all as the stuff you wear when you are wealthy and lost and involved in an L.A. sex cult.
Have you been watching The Idol? Please share your thoughts in the comments!
Earlier in Back Row:
I have watched both episodes thus far. There’s some witty dialogue towards the start of the first one (and some great casting, bar Hank Azria’s v odd accent) but plenty of very grim bits - namely the gratuitous nudity/ gusset shots of LRD, who to be clear, has said she has never felt more respected, or that a set has been more collaborative, and that may be true but that doesn’t mean an audience feels respected, nor that a gusset shot adds anything to the plot! I do think we need to be careful about hearsay - in a recent Vanity Fair profile, Tesfaye says that he got on very well with Steimetz, and we haven’t yet heard from *her mouth* the truth. But the fact remains that while Euphoria was ground breaking, this isn’t.
Another HOWEVER: nepo baby or otherwise, LRD is vgood in the first half of the 2nd episode. If you really don’t like watching Tesfaye, you can watch the first half of this ep quite comfortably as he doesn’t appear in it at all - and LRD’s turn as a pop star breaking down while making a music video and trying to hold it together (the Britney inspo is very clear) is, I think, really good. But I’m not sure any reviews will get so far to say that, as the rest of it all feels so gross and eye-rolly!
Last note (of this long comment, lol) is that Sam Levinson thinking that all this ‘heat’ means they’ve made the show of the summer, is plain wrong. I think 5 years ago people would have loved the kind of car crash vibe around it all/ been drawn to it - now people know too much, are too jaded, CBA. I don’t know the ratings (do you?) but I suspect they aren’t anything like they thought’d they would be.
Thank you for watching so I don't have to.
I'm already preparing to white knuckle it through And Just Like That, I don't have the stomach for torture porn about characters I don't have an invested para social relationship with!