The Sleazy HBO Flop The Idol is Terrible, Gross
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
I generally get to choose what I write about for My World of Flops but some fiascos are so massive, ubiquitous and universally maligned that I pretty much have to write about them.
I’m talking about stuff like Dear Evan Hansen, which I somehow have still managed not to see or write about. Why? I suppose because I’m waiting for someone to choose it for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 so I will be obligated to cover it.
The Flash similarly qualifies as something that I need to write about for My World of Flops because it was, ironically, a slow-motion train wreck whose famously troubled production and post-production seemed to last centuries, not years.
That is equally true of The Idol, a zeitgeist-chasing provocation from Sam Levinson, the creator of Euphoria and the son of the man who directed Rain Man, and pop star Abel Tesfaye AKA The Weeknd that attracted some of the worst and most buzz in television history.
The Idol is really two disasters in one since two versions of the show were filmed with the same lead actors but a different supporting cast and director.
The first incarnation of The Idol was filmed by Amy Seimetz, a talented actress, writer and filmmaker and one of the most auspicious alumni of the mumblecore movement and featured a supporting cast that included Elizabeth Berkley and Anne Heche in what would have been her final television role.
Eighty percent of the show was apparently finished when The Weeknd, a pop star whose experience as an actor is limited to playing himself in Uncut Gems and whose experience as a writer is limited to co-writing a single episode of American Dad, reportedly decided that the show under Seimetz’s direction had too much of a “female perspective” and she had to go.
So Sam Levinson stepped in and directed every episode in addition to writing, co-creating and Executive Producing. Levinson unfortunately is the most hated Nepo Baby this side of Max Landis and Chet Haze. So the news that he would be assuming total control over a project as sketchy and problematic as it is provocative and incendiary was not warmly received.
The optics, as the kids say, were terrible, particularly since as part of the endless revelations of #MeToo Seimetz had gone public with the abuse she suffered during her relationship with independent filmmaker Shane Caruth, who directed her in Upstream Color.
Now Seimetz was getting screwed over professionally by toxic creators intent on controlling her and keeping her from expressing her own creative voice instead of realizing two awful men's muddled ideas.
The bad press became a hurricane of deadly buzz when Rolling Stone ran a juicy expose depicting the taping of the two different incarnations of The Idol as the television equivalent of the making of Heaven’s Gate. The key difference is that Heaven’s Gate is a masterpiece. The Idol is merely a very costly mistake.
In an act of juvenile pettiness the show suggested that Rolling Stone was just mad because, in a clip it shared online that does not appear in the show, characters refer to the ancient rock and roll magazine as old and irrelevant.
Instead of making Rolling Stone look bad the people behind the show came off as thin-skinned assholes.
The Idol asked, and then unfortunately answered the question, "What would happen if Britney Spears turned to a Keith Raniere-like cult leader for guidance and inspiration in the aftermath of a very public nervous breakdown?
The show’s Britney Spears figure is Jocelyn (Lily Rose-Depp), a pop star and sex symbol reeling from the death of her mother. It does not seem accidental that the show stars the daughter of a man who was once a beloved sex symbol and pop idol himself before becoming, confusingly, a villain of the #MeToo movement and a hero to Men’s Rights activists, extremely online misogynists and other creepy men convinced that we are in the midst of an epidemic of women falsely accusing powerful men of rape and abuse for financial and professional gain.
The Keith Reniere surrogate, meanwhile, is a degenerate who calls himself Tedros Tedros (Abel Tesfaye) and owns a nightclub where Joselyn ends up one night. The two hook up before the creepy dude with the air of unhinged intensity and a deeply unfortunate rat tail proceeds to take over Jocelyn’s life and career.
Jocelyn’s death has left a vacuum in her life that Tedros immediately sets about filling. But Tedros doesn’t come alone. He brings along an entourage of young performers who treat him like a guru, sage and mentor with all of life’s answers.
In his sexy young cult Tedros has something the pop music world and Los Angeles have never seen before: attractive, talented, sexually uninhibited young singers with ambitions to pop stardom.
Tedros promises to help unlock Jocelyn’s creativity by moving into her mansion along with his cutltists and using sex, sadomasochism, BDSM, voyeurism, exhibitionism and bondage to really spice up her music.
The cult leader’s methods may be unconventional and involve reducing Jocelyn’s inflow of air so that she is in danger of suffocating but gosh darn it, they get results.
Love Dan Levy? Then you might enjoy his three minutes in the show!
The version of The Idol that got released and bombed is weirdly devoid of empathy for Jocelyn. It lacks the ability to see her as anything other than a victim (or faux-victim) and a victimizer as well as prey for the worst man in Los Angeles but also a predator.
Rose-Depp gives it her all but the character is never more than a glamorous cipher, a beautiful blank for audiences to project their desires and fantasies upon.
The Idol falls into the trap of so much entertainment about famous women who are treated as disposable sex objects for a culture that uses beautiful young people and then throws them away in flagrantly doing what it should be satirizing and critiquing.
Levinson and Tesfaye’s deeply icky exploration of sex, drugs and lascivious pop music can't help but objectify Jocelyn. She’s nearly naked the entire show, as are many of the cultists but Tesfaye gets to keep his clothes on, weirdly enough.
The Idol’s five hour long episodes pass slowly and painfully. The Idol makes sex dull. It makes transgression grey and lifeless. It’s a look at the warped psyches of toxic men with insane egos that feels unmistakably like the product of toxic men with out of control egos.
There are moments of dark, misanthropic humor in The Idol, particularly involving the cynical show-business lifers who cannot keep Jocelyn from giving herself over to a monster but the show is devoid of even a single moment of genuine levity. It’s not funny. It’s just mean.
In the fifth and final episode of The Idol a dramatic shift in the central dynamic occurs. Hooking up with an old boyfriend apparently opens Jocelyn’s eyes to Tedros’ true nature. He’s not a guru. He’s not a sage. He’s not her salvation. He’s just an abusive pimp with a bad haircut and anger issues.
In a heartbeat the spell is gone. Jocelyn stops giving her abuser power over her professionally, personally and sexually and coldly kicks him to the curb.
The only power that Tedros has, ultimately, is the power that Jocelyn and his acolytes give him. Without it he’s just an ex-con grifter who happened onto an extremely lucrative con and exploited it for all its worth.
In a different context, this might come across as empowering, even feminist. Within this context, however, Jocelyn’s actions have a more sinister context.
The Idol ultimately portrays its protagonist as what misogynist would consider an Amber Heard-like figure, a cold-blooded sociopath willing to play the victim personally and professionally to get what she wants.
It’s not unusual for members of a cult to see the light and leave but I imagine it’s a gradual process. You don’t think that Keith Raniere is the world’s smartest man and give yourself over to a life of servitude and slavery one day and see him as a pathetic con man the next.
But the ugly subtext of The Idol is that Jocelyn was never as vulnerable as she behaved because she got off on Tedros’ abuse and then used him and his darkness to re-invigorate her career and hook up with a galaxy of future stars, then tossed him cavalierly aside when he was no longer needed.
The Idol asks who the real monster is, someone who physically, emotionally and sexually abused people who had total faith in him or an attractive woman who is cold, calculating, ambitious and willing to play any role in order to realize her ambitions?
I’m going to go with the guy with the abusive cult but Levinson and Tesfaye obviously feel it's a more complicated situation.
If The Idol were somehow to be picked up for a second season in violation of God’s will and the will of the American people it would explore the ever-changing power dynamic between Jocelyn and Tedros after she lets him back into her world in a big way at the end of the final episode by bringing him onstage at her homecoming concert and describing him as the love of her life.
I make my living through words but I need just one to describe The Idol: gross. The Idol is fucking gross. That’s what HBO got for a reported SEVENTY FIVE MILLION DOLLARS: something so pervasively, consistently gross that it makes your skin crawl.
That, I’m guessing, is not what they were going for.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiasco
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