HBO’s The Idol: A Bad Sign for All Involved
There is no longer any margin of error for young creatives to strike out and craft something completely new, in hopes that an audience will emerge for it. Marketing is as expensive as ever, actors are expensive, and even set-building has become significantly more expensive. Instead of needing to discover a new audience for a new IP, the expanding library of old, accessible IPs under the control of mega-merger corporations like Warner Brothers opens up dried wells of deprived and nostalgic fans, happy to dispose of their income to indulge in a romantic re-visitation of their past selves. This is why the “multiverse story” has quickly gone from an exciting idea with philosophical implications about ways in which our world is uniquely singular, to a tired and over-employed vehicle for merchandising and “mad-libs” style story writing. It’s popular because it works. For most people, particular media properties will always have a place in their TV/movie/gaming diet– studios have recognized and weaponized that brand loyalty to cut down on ridiculous marketing costs. The end result has been a creative media landscape which has undeniably stagnated in its ability to put forward entirely new ideas or concepts for mass consumption, and consequently become artistically inert. New IPs are increasingly rare from big studios. HBO, for example, could only release four original IPs this year, five if you include the show about Watergate. Out of those four originals, one stands out for having been both a massive critical lashing post, and a huge success of viewership and earned media, The Idol.
HBO’s The Idol began and ended its life as a vanity project between Euphoria director Sam Levinson and pop music magnate Abel Tesfaye, also known as The Weeknd. The show’s pitch was an exploration of the romance between a self-help guru who leads a cult, Tesfaye’s character, and a pop star with a history of mental illness trying to re-launch her ailing career, played by Lily-Rose Depp, directed by Amy Seimetz. However, Seimetz did not last as the director– in early 2022, despite having shot 80% of the series, she was abruptly announced to no longer be involved in directing the show, in favour of Sam Levinson. Levinson reportedly scrapped everything to start from scratch when taking over. It’s not uncommon for a show to switch or alternate between directors, many shows have been highly successful and consistent despite that arrangement, and in some instances owing to it. However, given Sam Levinson’s reputation for monopolizing control on set, the creative shift was a clear point of delineation from the original conceit. The end product of his work was a show which markets itself as subversive and controversial, while swaddled in the sort of comfortable, post-ironic indulgences that Levinson’s work has often embodied.
After Seimetz’s departure, the two men who conceptualized the series were given “carte blanche” to spin it off in another direction. The show underwent extensive re-shooting to make up for the hours of canned footage, and you can get a sense of the crunch this show must have undergone to meet production deadlines just by watching it. The plot lacks consistent action, and scenes often go on for much longer than they seemingly need. Scenes take place in an unclear and non-linear sequence, creating difficult-to-understand plot points. Most of all, the vast majority of the show takes place in one location, Jocelyn’s mansion, which is actually Tesfaye’s real-life residence in Bel-Air. This creates tonal dissonance with the actual concept of the show, fame. Jocelyn doesn’t seem any more famous than a typical influencer, even in scenes which are supposed to show us exactly how famous she is. She just has a big house. In many ways, the show feels like the “aged-up” version of Euphoria many casual fans have pined for, in hopes that the exploitative eye of such a show would not feel quite as slimy, but it just goes to show that the issues with such a show would still be mostly the same. Sam Levinson’s penchant for making ”trashy” or voyeuristic content is well-known, and perhaps one of the central appeals of his work. His gratuitous usage of nudity and sexuality when depicting underage characters in Euphoria has often bordered on the pornographic, and The Idol seems to market itself to the same audience urges. The Weeknd, too, has been known for his particularly male-centric view of sexuality. Despite a recent turn towards a much more humanized and softer side in his music, the vast majority of Tesfaye’s catalogue has challenged audiences with its blend of casual disregard for its female subjects, and its explicit detailing of his own devious dealings with drugs and sex. In some ways, there is an undeniable chemistry between the creative direction of the XO founder and the central idea of the show, but the end product could use some distillation.
From a glance at the earlier synopsis, one might assume that The Weeknd’s cultish character Tedros is the series’ antagonist. Certainly while watching, the audience grows to hold a natural disdain for Tedros. He manipulates, deceives and abuses several characters on the show as his default behaviour, most of all Jocelyn. He is also implied to have a sexual relationship with Suzanna Son’s underaged character, Chloe. Yet, Tedros ends the series as something entirely different, in some ways, vindicated and proven correct in his methods. His abuses to Jocelyn are re-framed as having been essential to her recovery from creative depression, while he himself is discarded and then re-collected by Jocelyn at the end of the show as a strange attempt at subverting power dynamics. The series reinforces an idea that Tedros and his acolytes espouse, that the greatest art comes from the darkest of experiences, which Tedros is uniquely able to manufacture for the talented few. This is one of the few philosophical questions that the show makes an earnest attempt to engage with. At first through one of Tedros’ artists, Izaak, played by Moses Sumney, who explains the idea to Jocelyn in a very rudimentary way. He tells her “the world” could not have gotten a beautiful song like “All My Love” without the tragic personal circumstances which put Robert Plant in the headspace to write a song like that, the death of his young child. The impact of this idea on Jocelyn’s character is not felt until later in the same episode when Tedros decides to make a lesson of this to her in front of all of her houseguests. He forces her to drop her veil of secrecy and relinquish her privacy in multiple ways, including an Instagram Live in which she tells the whole world of her mother’s abuses. Within the language of the show, this is meant to be understood as the most positive aspect of how Tedros is coaching her, making her come to grips with the side of herself which is irreparably damaged from her past. In the end, it brings her massive success in the music industry, and in turn brings great benefit to the show’s true villains, exploitative label heads and executives who really could care less how the sausage is being made.
In some ways, the show still feels like a walk-in fridge full of differing, uncooked ideas haphazardly stacked on top of one another. The setting and environment of the show would seemingly be ripe for commentary on a great number of ways in which our contemporary media operates and makes its money from the exploitation of spectacle. The bones for that kind of cultural critique are certainly there. For instance, a brushed-over plot point about Rob, Jocelyn’s actor ex-boyfriend, being framed for a sexual assault by Tedros resulting in his new film digitally altering his face out. Without having seen the original script for this show, it seems likely that Seimetz had a much more typically progressive and feminist interpretation of the setting than Levinson ultimately brought to the table. Instead, elements of exploitation are reclaimed as empowerment by the female lead. Even seemingly dark and sardonic shows like Succession default to predictably progressive and well-explored themes of the ways in which consumerism has engulfed all of culture and society, sprinkle in a little feminist lens and cash out on mass appeal. It provides a consistently relatable backdrop for almost any viewer to find common ground with both the characters and the writers of the show, because almost anybody who watches will be able to identify with some part of this formula. The characters, even if they are the unserious children of billionaires, will deal with these problems much in the same ways we find ourselves defaulting to because they are universal. Yet, The Idol purposely makes itself unattainable. Even in the places where relatability should be found, the show goes out of its way to portray the lives and exploits of these people as beyond the scope of regular comprehension, without any hint of irony. The dichotomy made between a star and a regular human being illustrate this aggrandized sense of self-importance clearly, and text of the show never offers any challenge to this perspective. Jocelyn’s insistence, for instance, that there is “nothing about her which is relatable”, is immediately followed up by her recounting a horrible life experience which, according to this article in The National Library of Medicine, is something that about one in every five people can relate to. This dissonance between Jocelyn’s self-perception and the reality of the situation is not addressed, it seems to be something that the show believes. That the pain and experiences of artists inform a completely unique and motivational perspective that the great ones can tap into. I don’t mean to suggest there is no element of truth to this thesis, of course, art is informed by the unique and often traumatic experiences of the artistic. But despite making a point of showing the ways in which big media is willing to exploit this process, is the show’s creeping eye the best way to show it? Had the show made more of an effort to comment on these issues, then perhaps it could be read more charitably, but everything about the text and persona of this show revels in that same exploitative theatre.
It is subversive in a stupid way. The Idol goes out of its way to make sure critical audience perspectives are acknowledged through surrogate characters like Leia, Jocelyn’s long-suffering best friend, and the Intimacy Coordinator, then devotes chunks of runtime to belittling and embarrassing them. If you watch this show and are in some way concerned about the consensuality of the nudity, sex, or really the entertainment medium as a whole, this show really has nothing but the middle finger for you. I would suspect that this is the show leaning away from the “female perspective”, but to what end? The show wants to be judged for its own merits as a piece of art, not muddled in questions about the moral implications of the material. This is a natural urge for any creative enterprise, but when a show is so deeply insecure about these questions as not even to challenge its own perspective, it only leaves more for that section of the critical audience to pry at. This is only made more clear by the exclusion of a particular clip, which was posted to the official social media page during the show’s second week of run-time, from the final product. This petty return fire at Rolling Stone for an unfavorable review of their vapid show, and its exclusion from the final product after a justified backlash about how bad this scene was, illustrate the insecurity of the show’s intellectual range and tolerance for critique.
More than anything else, I hate what this show represents for the media landscape as a whole. It is one of the most boring “hate-watch” shows I can remember. It doesn’t hit the same notes as an “Emily in Paris” or a “Riverdale” in which the audience is able to at least draw pleasure out of the knowledge that what they are watching is stupid. On those types of programs, the show is able to make knowing winks back to this subsumed audience with increasingly contrived plots and jokes which eschew humor entirely. The Idol is five episodes (cut down from six during the creative transition from Seimetz to Levinson) for a good reason, it said all it sought out to say and was ended. There was no irony or camp to this program, it was a legitimately bad show to most people who watched it. Yet, this vanity project between HBO’s most hated director and music’s #1 pop icon was able to pull millions of skeptical viewers every week based on the gravity of the two names on its placard. On those merits, the show is a raging success for HBO. While we haven’t gotten any news or announcements of a second season for this show, I suspect the reasons to not renew are more internal than anything having to do with the public perception of the end product. At the end of the day, a hated series which many people watch achieves the same bottom line as a beloved series which experiences the same success. In the streaming era, where viewership and media’s ability to entice the audience to commit to another month of paying for a subscription is everything, it doesn’t matter if the art creative is substantive or meaningful or even good, it just needs to be worth talking about. Ultimately, The Idol will live and die based on its controversy, and that’s all it ever really needed to do.
