'The Idol' Is Bad Television

By Dustin Rowles | TV | June 12, 2023 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | June 12, 2023 |

It’s difficult to express how terrible the writing on The Idol is. There’s a sequence that everyone is talking about today where Johnny Depp’s daughter whispers in the ear of a rat-tailed The Weeknd, “I want you to get that robe from my closet and tie it around my face and f**k me until you feel me blackout.” Tedros, the skeezy character played by The Weeknd, blindfolds Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp) and talks dirty to her while she masturbates on the other side of the room. “You look like a treat,” he whispers. “Imagine my tongue on your pu**y. My fat tongue.” Then he tells her that he wants her to “choke on his c*ck.”

“Yeah… put your finger down your throat and make that, make that throat wet for me. Yeah.”

“F**kin’ stretch that tiny little pu**y,” he says to her, and then we have to hear the gargling sounds of his penis in her mouth.

It’s big-budget, low-rent Skinemax. I don’t care about the sexual content, but the writing gives me full-body heaves. Sam Levinson is a hack. This is middle-school drivel, and while Jane Adams might be able to salvage a line like “giant f**king big-titted hits,” Abel Tesfaye decidedly cannot. If you were to take a drink every time that The Idol made you cringe, your pores would be leaking alcohol like a fountain by the midway point of the episode. The good news, however, is that there are only 70 “likes” in this week’s episode, down 16 from the premiere.

What’s worse, however, is that for the second episode of two, The Idol is excruciatingly dull. There are only five episodes of this show, and in this episode, almost nothing happens. In the first eight minutes, Jocelyn adds a lot of cringey breathing and moaning to her new single, and her people — especially the record-label exec played by Adams — spend the next several minutes telling her what a bad idea it is until they’ve stripped away all of her confidence.

hbo sunday nights going from tlou to succession to this… LMAO #THEIDOL pic.twitter.com/Sv6aD2xdVc

— sarah (@xoxossaraah) June 12, 2023

What little sense of security remains is drilled out of her over the next half-hour of the episode, which is almost entirely devoted to a single sequence in Jocelyn’s music video set in a strip club. She can’t get it right. Her feet are mangled and bloody from her shoes, her thighs are rubbed raw, and by the end, she’s on the verge of another breakdown, crying and asking for her mother, who is dead. At one point during that half-hour, the record-label exec practically auditions a backup dancer, Dyanne (Jennie Kim), to replace Jocelyn.

Dyanne, it turns out, is one of the people who belong to Tedros’ cult. Another one, Isaac (Moses Sumney), works to soften Jocelyn’s best friend and assistant, Leia (Rachel Sennot), by f**king her. A fourth cult member, Cloe (Suzanna Son), watches Tedros and Jocelyn have sex during the third act of the episode and then leads everyone in a piano sing-along after they have wrapped up their evening of debauchery.

“It’d be easier if I moved in,” Tedros says to Jocelyn after they’ve f**ked and she’s smoking her 47th cigarette of the episode. “For work purposes, ya know?”

Jocelyn takes a 12-second beat while she takes another drag of her cigarette. “I’d like that.”

Therein lies the point of the episode. Tedros has infiltrated Jocelyn’s home along with his sex henchmen, Isaac, Dyanne, and Chloe. They are presumably there to rob Jocelyn of her last bit of sanity before replacing her. Isaac will keep the best friend away; Dyanne will replace Jocelyn at work, while Chloe replaces her in bed. Tedros, meanwhile, will neg Jocelyn until she completely loses her mind.