Both singer Abel Tesfaye (aka The Weeknd) and writer/director Sam Levinson are obsessed with the trappings of fame. This obsession manifests in their art—many of Tesfaye's earlier albums focus on how his newfound stardom is changing his life for the worse as well as the better, while Levinson's most recent film, Malcolm & Marie, was a thinly veiled response to a lot of the criticism he's received as a filmmaker. To these men, the eye of the public is always watching. You'd think that this more than qualifies the pair to tell a story about a pop star that's bombarded by the repercussions of her stardom at all times, but maybe The Idol is perhaps proof that they aren't.
There's been a lot of controversy around The Idol. Levinson, who writes and directs the entire season, has a bit of a reputation for filling his works with bits of weird sex. It was one of the major criticisms levied at his film Assassination Nation, which in turn inspired Malcolm & Marie, and his hit show Euphoria is stuffed with sex and nudity. When first impressions of The Idol came out after its premiere at Cannes, a lot of the criticism was aimed at its sexual content. With me being a longtime Euphoria "this show looks great but WOW some of this writing is awful" advocate, I was both unsurprised and unsure of what to expect from The Idol.
So The Idol is here, and yep, it's almost exactly what I expected. It looks great—Levinson has always had an eye for creating gorgeous and dynamic shots, and the color grading works beautifully in tandem with them. The filmmaking is pretty on point all throughout "Pop Tarts & Rat Tales," as is to be expected at this point in Levinson's career. Without it, the episode would only have a couple of performances to stand on, but his clear talent in the craft of filmmaking elevates everything he makes to some degree.
The episode's opening shot begins as a closeup of singer Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp) while a photographer requests that she portray several different expressions like "innocence," "mischievous," and "pure sex." The photographer asks her to do "emotional," and she immediately begins to silently weep. She's just a vessel for the emotions everyone—the photographer, her fans, her industry—wants her to embody. The camera pulls back as she transitions back into sex appeal, and we see she's kneeling on a table littered with alcohol bottles. As it continues to pull, the bored crew comes into view around her. Most of them seem a little disinterested, like they've done this before. And that's when the realization hits—though we started in Jocelyn's world, there's a much bigger one outside of her, and it could very well get tired of her. It can afford to.
Sadly, there's nothing as cool as this in the pilot of The Idol again. There are a few other good performances; Rachel Sennott, an actress I've always liked, plays Jocelyn's best friend and assistant pretty well. All of the people who control her image—her publicist, her managers, the executive of her record label—are played with very gross and believable sleaze. A lot of this is forgotten about when Tesfaye's character Tedros shows up, though.
A better actor (or, you know, an actual actor) could play Tedros with any sort of seduction or menace—the qualities he's trying to show to Jocelyn to get her to trust him, and the emotion he should be carrying to make the audience feel...anything about him? Tesfaye is a co-writer on The Idol's story with Levinson, so it does feel just a little odd that he wrote himself in as a character who gets to make out with Jocelyn a lot.
I don't really have an aversion to depictions of sex and nudity in film and television, but I do think it needs to not just be for shock value and "isn't this is weird/hot?" There could be an interesting/disturbing scene born out of one where Jocelyn is choking herself while she masturbates, but as it's not something that builds on who she is or what the audience knows, it just comes across as being there for the sake of being there. Same with the ending of the episode, where Tedros gets into her house and they have some talk about how fame makes everybody fake towards you. It comes off as vapid. Jocelyn is clearly isolated and a little unstable, but to have some random guy roll in and sweep her off her feet is weird and not properly built up, especially when a lot of the episode is just the characters dicking around.
I've been skimming on plot description, but that's about all there is to it. The first half of "Pop Tarts & Rat Tales" is concerned with a suggestive selfie of Jocelyn's that's been leaked that then just kind of...goes away, and the back half feels like an episode crammed into half an episode's runtime. The Idol was everything I was expecting near the start—it looks really great, it's got some very surface-level writing, and some good performances mixed in with some not so good ones. I guess we just have to see if that'll continue from there.
This episode of The Idol is now available on Max.