Tedious, pointless, cringe-inducing: why The Idol was a failure from start to finish

Even as it aired, Sam Levinson’s disastrous erotic thriller felt like a pulpy box-office flop rescued from the archives. It was so nothingy it’s hard to even tell what its point was – if anything

The Idol, the Weeknd and Sam Levinson’s embattled, controversial, woefully received erotic thriller, wrapped up after five weeks last night – not with a bang, nor a whimper, but a profound: huh? What was this show about, if anything? Nothing happened: the plot points covered in this show could make about two tight hours’ worth of television – or one probably-quite-watchable film – and instead were stretched to five, each episode padded out with extended musical numbers, montages of a sun-drenched Los Angeles, and some mightily cringe-inducing sex scenes.

In its final hour, the show was nothing if not consistent. By my count, about half the episode’s run-time was taken up with an extended showcase in which five characters – Moses Sumney’s Izaak; Troye Sivan’s Xander; Suzanna Son’s Chloe; Ramsey, playing herself; and, of course, Lily-Rose Depp’s Jocelyn – all performed entire solo musical numbers. (It was, at the very least, funny to watch Sumney and Depp grind on a bunch of bewildered label reps in what I have to assume was one of the show’s many improvised scenes.) The show’s main mystery – who, exactly, is Tedros, the mysterious would-be svengali played by the Weeknd? – is wrapped up in a single scene, in which music execs played by Hank Azaria, Jane Adams and Eli Roth laugh cartoonishly as they recount his history as a pimp, a sordid past dredged up by Vanity Fair reporter Talia (Hari Nef) in, apparently, less than a week.

It doesn’t need to be said that this is not the TV show we were promised. It’s not – following HBO going in “a new creative direction” – a provocative thriller directed by brilliant indie film-maker Amy Seimetz that features Showgirls’ Elizabeth Berkley and the final on-screen performance of the late Anne Heche. It’s also not the merry-go-round of gratuitous torture porn that crew members alleged the Weeknd and Levinson turned it into in a January Rolling Stone report. Instead, The Idol was curiously normal: not high art; no more morally objectionable than many other self-consciously transgressive TV shows. Occasionally, it was great as a so-bad-it’s-good watch, but more often it was just kind of boring.

There were flashes of brilliance among the shots of Depp sullenly smoking by the pool. The scenes of music-industry satire, in which withered executives drooled over gratuitous nudity, mental illness and scandal, rang fundamentally true, if a little cartoonish. The gag built into this episode’s musical showcase – which began with Roth’s and Adams’ characters about to write off Jocelyn and her band of weirdo stragglers, only for them to change their tune once they each received lapdances – was a little on-the-nose, but it was pretty funny, and, unfortunately, indicative of the way major label reps see dollar signs in their eyes the moment any performance becomes slutty and orgiastic.

Other industry-related plotlines didn’t quite click in the same way. Jocelyn’s backing dancer Dyanne, played by Blackpink’s Jennie, was being groomed by a music executive to cut a song originally intended for Jocelyn, with Levinson clearly attempting to wring tension from the idea that the pair would eventually come to loggerheads. Dyanne’s screen time was so minimal, though, that this never amounted to anything: Jocelyn won back the love of her label, and Dyanne was thrown into the industry meatgrinder. It’s kind of a fun joke, but it would have had far more resonance had the show been more driven by plot or character interaction than by pure vibe.

As The Idol wound to a close, it became evident that this wasn’t even the show that its cast and lead crew initially thought they were making. Dan Levy, originally part of the supporting cast and featured heavily in trailers, ended up appearing only in the first episode, making what amounted to a cameo. When I spoke to cast member Da’Vine Joy Randolph before it aired, she promised that the show’s status quo would shift dramatically as the season progressed; it didn’t really, unless you put a lot of stock in the final scenes, in which it’s implied that Jocelyn was the one pulling the strings the whole time. I don’t really buy that, simply because, for the bulk of the series, what you saw was what you got: some violent sex, some funny sex, a few immortal Rachel Sennott reaction shots, and very little in the way of genuine interiority for either Jocelyn or Tedros.

Had the show been longer, it might have been better able to sow its seeds, and the payoff would have been more satisfying. But it seems that Levinson might have struggled even more with a longer series, given the fact that the show was cut down from a planned six episodes to five. (I’m hoping that, somewhere down the line, we get to see the Seimetz-directed version of the show, which was shot then canned. Even in an incomplete form, it could hardly be worse than what we ended up with.)

I have no doubt that The Idol will be ripe for cringe-viewing in future. Watching over the past few weeks, it already felt a little like some kind of pulpy box-office flop rescued from the archives. And I’m profoundly indebted to the show for one significant reason: it gave us World Class Sinner, a Jocelyn hit that’s meant to be bad but which I – and many of my friends – just can’t stop listening to. Unlike much of The Idol, World Class Sinner is camp, ridiculous fun – a send-up of dumb pop music that still has all the shiver-inducing thrills of the real thing. If only The Idol had been half as good.

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