The Idol (2023)

It’s excess for excess’s sake, but none of the fun that comes with a well-placed beat drop. It’s an empty chorus.

The emphasis throughout is on the starlet’s body and her self-destructive streak, evidenced by a taste for slim cigarettes and erotic asphyxiation; her kinky hookups with Tedros are wince-inducing but hardly scandalizing in the way that the show intends them to be.

It’s all a lot and yet not enough. Skin-deep when it thinks it’s being profound. Almost like The Idol wants to be a hot-take discourse machine first and a television show second.

It is a hopeless try-hard, and worse, it's painfully dull. Starring Lily-Rose Depp and pop star The Weeknd (billed under his real name, Abel Tesfaye), “Idol” doesn’t work on any level.

The expression “From the sublime to the ridiculous” has seldom felt more fitting than in watching “The Idol,” HBO’s new wannabe-sexy drama, a week after the “Succession” and “Barry” finales. Although the series premiere isn’t as bad, or offensive, as reports of production issues and early reviews out of the Cannes Film Festival might have led people to believe, it’s guilty of another sin – namely, being just plain boring.

Levinson's version of The Idol is sex-obsessed, shallow, and oftentimes painfully predictable, at least as of the first two episodes.

Lily-Rose is fully committed. She gives everything: body, soul, and heart. And yet, you can’t help but wonder why she must answer for this much while receiving only morsels of a character. She deserves better. Unless “The Idol” changes drastically in the next few episodes, she will be nothing more than the window dressing of a concept in service of a misguided, gross, unaware, and untenable vanity project.

On one level, The Idol is yet another risible, cliche-riddled take on the music biz in which no cast member (Hank Azaria, Jane Adams) is permitted to speak normally. On another, it’s a post-#MeToo melodrama with a lead character whose heavily semaphored empowerment puts viewers squarely at fault if they dare to question the sleaze and cynicism on display.

It’s one of the most unapologetically chauvinistic, superficially glossy, try-hard-provocative pieces of media in recent memory.

Seems calculated to fool audiences into thinking they’re observing how Hollywood operates, when so much of it amounts to tawdry clichés lifted from Sidney Sheldon novels and softcore porn. “Showgirls” at least was a thinly veiled “All About Eve” remake, whereas “The Idol” plays like a sordid male fantasy.

Sex talk that manages to be a turn-off in two different ways is some screenwriting feat. Even the music is dreadful.

The Idol flails at enough satirical targets that it hits a few of them, such as when Nikki provides a rapaciously amoral explanation of why “mental illness is sexy,” because Jocelyn’s psychotic break makes people who couldn’t get within a hundred yards of her feel like they might still have a shot. But mostly the show just walks into the furniture, trying to scandalize the audience with tepid provocations while losing sight of the difference between satire and exploitation. It might get people to sing along, but it doesn’t have anything to say.

The show’s unwillingness or inability to frame Tesfaye, to seize his character and objectify him by the same token as Jocelyn, totally hampers the series, and shows how disingenuous Levinson’s intentions are. The Idol is a big, expensive mess—a glitchy collection of lazy “moments” that is sleazy in its intent. The shame here is that a veritable host of performers are wasted on this grim disaster.

While it’s tempting to say that everything you’ve heard about it is true, that may be soft-selling how skin-crawling the experience of actually watching this satire (?) on the seven circles of showbiz hell is. The double-dose the festival screened felt nasty, brutish, much longer than it is, and way, way worse than you’d have anticipated.