Global Courant
We came swimming to praise The Idol, but to bury it. That is assuming Sunday’s fifth episode is the last gasp for the widely scorned HBO series. The show’s creative team claims a five-episode season was the plan all along, scathing criticism be damned; HBO has not come out and said the series has been cancelled. But this doesn’t feel like it’s leading to a back-by-popular-demand kind of situation.
In any case, the final was neither a bang nor a whimper. It was, rather, not quite as bad as what preceded it. That can be either read as damning with faint praise, or seen as a small victory of sorts. Sam Levinson (Euphoria) and Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye’s softcore psychodrama about a young pop diva in crisis (Lily-Rose Depp) and the shady, sadistic club owner (Tesfaye) who takes over her life was an atonal pile-up of hazy character motives, narrative dead-ends, and remarkably unsexy sex scenes. Think Joe Eszterhas and Paul Verhoeven, whose 1992 erotic thriller Basic Instinct is shown on a TV screen early in the series, but without the redeeming nod-and-a-wink sense of fun. For fun was really missing in The Idol. A toxic cloud of unpleasantness wafted over this thing from the start, making it difficult to provide sober judgment or analysis. This might explain the visceral tone that dominated the criticism aimed at the series, from civilian viewers and critics alike.
Lily-Rose Depp as Jocelyn in ‘The Idol.’
Eddy Chen/HBO
The finale doubles down on the previously established dime-store Fellini atmosphere, as Depp’s Jocelyn invites her business team, including managers (Hank Azaria and the wonderful Da’Vine Joy Randolph), label exec (Jane Adams) and Live Nation honcho (Eli Roth ), over to her mansion for an impromptu showcase featuring the menagerie of artists assembled by Tedros (Tesfaye). She wants them to open for her on her tour, about which she is suddenly amped. Tedros, blank-eyed and high as a kite, glowers as his pet project seems to be reclaiming her life. The predator is defanged. That this actually feels good, from a viewing standpoint, is a bad sign. Tesfaye, indisputably talented in the pop sphere, has exuded a sort of anti-charisma from the moment he showed up in The Idol, which made it hard to buy him as a bent Svengali. When you start rooting for Roth’s smarmy touring executive, who explicitly compares Tedros to wannabe rock star Charles Manson, you know there’s a problem. The suits, for all of their self-absorbed ghoulishness, end up looking pretty good by comparison.
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Jocelyn has gained the upper hand here, and quickly. She is now playing Tedros, reversing the dominant dynamic for most of the series. It’s a jarring turnabout – so jarring, in fact, that it almost feels like something was shot and then abandoned between episodes four and five, something that might have led more gracefully to the dramatic shift. Then again, The Idol felt narratively malformed from the jump, so perhaps this is just more of the same.
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With something like “How did this ever happen?” bad as The Idol, it’s only fair to step back and note what actually did work. (There’s generally something to recommend in even the biggest mistakes, just as even a masterpiece will have minor missteps). Randolph is a revelation, gritting her way through a variety of emotional states with a confidence that suggests she knows she’ll be around after this particular ship sinks. Azaria has fun with what appears to be an Israeli mobster who muscled and guiled his way into showbiz. The cinematography can be quite striking, especially in integrating the show’s human circus with Jocelyn’s opulent crib (which is actually Tesfaye’s real-life, princely Bel Air mansion). There is a tradition of decadent Los Angeles architecture on film, and The Idol is now part of it.
And now, may it molder. HBO has had worse mishaps. It produced an entire season of a horserace drama, Luck, that never saw the light of day after multiple horses tragically died on the set. (I actually got to screen that season before it was canceled. It was quite good, which obviously doesn’t excuse the treatment of the horses). Long story short, they’ll survive. And The Idol will be a TV footnote, the show that didn’t seem to realize it had become what it sort of tried to satirize. Alas, poor Tedros.
