The Idol: The Weeknd, Sam Levinson successfully dodge decent storytelling in HBO slog
HBO music industry drama fails to satirize contemporary pop stardom
After months of reports detailing a disastrous production, an exodus of cast and crew, and poor reviews out of the Cannes Film Festival, HBO's music industry drama The Idol, about a bad girl pop star (Lily-Rose Depp) who falls for a self-help guru and cult leader (Canadian singer-turned-actor Abel "The Weeknd" Tesfaye), premiered on Sunday night.
Tesfaye co-created the series with Euphoria showrunner Sam Levinson — and dear god, someone should have stopped them.
The show opens with a tediously long sequence where Jocelyn (Depp) is posing for a partly nude photo shoot, writhing and purring for the camera, as one does. Nearby, her creative director Xander (pop singer Troye Sivan) and record label exec Nikki (Hacks' Jane Adams) opine, teetering rather annoyingly into exposition, about Jocelyn's star image: she had a psychotic breakdown after her mother's death a year prior and is returning to life in the public eye.
The words "mental illness is sexy" are said out loud.
Jocelyn's shoot is interrupted when an intimacy co-ordinator steps in to remind the photographer that the singer's nudity rider restricts which parts of her body can be shown. Once Jocelyn gets wind of the co-ordinator's intrusion, she speaks to her manager Chaim (Hank Azaria, doing a confusing accent) — it's her body, after all, and she can do what she wants with it. The guy ends up locked in a closet, Levinson has made his contempt for intimacy co-ordinators known, and we move on.
Things start to get hairy after the rest of Jocelyn's team — assistant and best friend Leia (Shiva Baby's Rachel Sennott), co-manager Destiny (Tony nominee Da'Vine Joy Randolph), and publicist Benjamin (Schitt's Creek's Dan Levy) — discover that a compromising photo of her has leaked on social media, where she's been described, in graphic terms, as the object of male pleasure.
Let's pause there. As much as it's painful to admit, one can understand what Levinson et al are going for here. During an era of the pop star comeback story, where many of the most famous women of the aughts are reclaiming their personal narratives over a decade after they were subjected to gruelling, misogynist public attention, The Idol is trying to satirize the current feminist-bent of female celebrity, undercutting the girl power of it all with a story of sleaziness enabled by industry and social media.
That's an interesting premise. But if this first episode is anything to go by, The Idol fails miserably. As much as Depp brings a kind of naturalism to the role — such as her scenes with Sennott, the flustered friendployee — the character she's playing is like a paper doll, barely emoting. Characters don't have to be likeable (we're well into the age of the TV anti-hero, Succession and Barry being two recent examples) but the least they can be is not dull, particularly in a series that was billed to be as sexy and risqué as this one.
Overstimulating with little takeaway
Like any HBO show, The Idol has high production value and stylish cinematography. But its substance-disinclined creator, Levinson, is more concerned with overstimulating his viewers than saying anything new or worthy about the pressures that women face in the public eye.
He throws a whole bunch of images at us — a masturbation scene, an erotic asphyxiation scene, the protagonist's admission that she likes how her love interest is "rapey" — but there's little takeaway, other than Levinson's low-hanging desire to provoke pearl-clutchers.
While unwinding at a nightclub with her friends, Jocelyn meets Tesfaye's character Tedros, who owns the joint. He slimily approaches her for a dance, later telling her, "You got the best job in the world. You should be having way more fun." Incidentally, that's sort of how this reviewer felt while taking notes.
Like his contemporary Harry Styles, Tesfaye had a good turn in a critically acclaimed film (playing himself as The Weeknd in 2019's Uncut Gems) that led to delusions of performance grandeur: he is not a good actor. And if multiple reports from Deadline, IndieWire and Rolling Stone are true, he's not a very good producer, either.
Amy Seimetz, the independent filmmaker behind Sun Don't Shine and The Girlfriend Experience, was at first attached to The Idol as its writer-director. But she left mid-production in April 2022, reportedly after Tesfaye was unhappy that her approach to the story leaned too much into the female perspective. Bullet successfully dodged!
It's sad to think that we won't get to see Seimetz's version of The Idol. Several years ago she directed a film called She Dies Tomorrow that was an inventive, haunting and funny depiction of a woman grappling with mental illness and grief, something that — after extensive reshoots, recuts, rewriting and a significant overhaul of the cast and crew — the charlatan Levinson has not come even close to conjuring.
The Idol airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and Crave.
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