The Idol TV review — HBO’s send-up of the music industry is sleazy and self-defeating

HBO is in the midst of a succession crisis. Having delivered one of the greatest shows of all time, the network is now left searching for an heir. But The Idol, its first pick to fill Succession’s primetime slot, is very clearly not, to paraphrase Logan Roy, serious television.

What it is, however, is a seriously ill-conceived, cynical vanity project created by and starring pop behemoth The Weeknd (real name Abel Tesfaye). Billed as a dark, subversive send-up of how the music industry treats its vulnerable stars, the five-part series self-defeatingly revels in the same lubricious sleaze and uneasy power dynamics it claims to skewer. It is soft porn diaphanously cloaked as a “provocative” drama; the kind of show that trades on words such as “controversial” and “divisive” and yet — if the uniformly damning Cannes reviews are anything to go by — seems ironically destined to unite people in their distaste for it.

Not that you get the sense that Tesfaye has made The Idol with anyone but a priapic demographic in mind, having reportedly sacked the original director Amy Seimetz for bringing an overly “female perspective” to a story about an exploited young woman. Her replacement, Sam Levinson (the showrunner behind Euphoria), accordingly reshot almost the entire series, this time seemingly from a perspective of a prurient man.

We begin, tellingly, with the camera fixed on Lily-Rose Depp’s Jocelyn (a Britney-esque pop sensation) as she’s directed through a series of sultry poses. Nearby an entourage discusses the optics of announcing their client’s return from a nervous breakdown with a shoot in which she wears a skimpy robe and medical bracelet. “Mental illness is sexy,” says exec Nikki (Jane Adams) to vaguely conscientious spin-doctor (Dan Levy). Elsewhere manager Chaim (a parodically accented Hank Azaria) is vexed by a sedulous intimacy co-ordinator; it’s not exactly clear whom the joke is meant to be on here.

While these slickly shot opening scenes capture Jocelyn’s lack of control — as we see her shepherded from photographer to choreographer while a committee keeps her in the dark about a leaked, graphic image of her — the show itself doesn’t offer her much agency or individual identity. Over the first hour we see almost every inch of her flesh, but little attempt to flesh her out as a character.

Things of course may yet improve, but it feels inauspicious that they get considerably worse as the pilot goes on and once Tesfaye appears. He plays Tedros, an apparently irresistible but shady club owner under whose thrall Jocelyn immediately falls. They dance and flirt in ultra-stylised scenes straight from a cheap perfume ad, and talk weightily about the power of music before Tedros proceeds to give her an “erotic” awakening involving suffocation and a knife. Earlier, Jocelyn mentions that she likes his “rapey” aura. Empowering, all this is not.

There are several other glib or otherwise excruciatingly clunky lines in the episode, but one does feel revealing: “When you’re famous everyone lies to you,” says Tedros. You suspect had Tesfaye received some more honest feedback himself, The Idol would have been an entirely different proposition.

★★☆☆☆

Episode 1 airs tonight, 9pm, Sky Atlantic. New episodes air weekly and are available to stream on NOW. On HBO and Max in the US