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Few reveals this 12 months have been as deftly hyped as The Idol, HBO’s glossy new drama from Euphoria creator Sam Levinson and Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye. Over the previous few months, the sequence has been mentioned and promoted in essentially the most sensational phrases. Billed by HBO as a “twisted, turbulent love story,” trailers dropped with tone-setting traces like “When was the final actually fucking nasty-nasty dangerous pop woman?” The present premiered on the Cannes Movie Pageant — a press release in itself — and reviews from the competition forged the present as a piece of shock jock lasciviousness. The Idol, it appeared, was a scandal within the type of a status drama.
The truth is way more boring than that.
“Pop Tarts & Rat Tales,” The Idol’s premiere, is cut up in two components: The primary half reads like a one-act play about Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp), a mononymous pop star on the day of a PR disaster. That is the most effective The Idol has to supply. Throughout the present’s opening half-hour, viewers study that Jocelyn is making an attempt to mount a comeback after a nervous breakdown led her to cancel a tour.
Over the course of a day, Jocelyn does a risqué photograph shoot, rehearses the choreography for her new single’s music video, and sits for an interview with Self-importance Honest. In the meantime, within the background, the gears of recent superstar flip round her. An intimacy coordinator has a farcical argument with a supervisor over the nudity within the shoot. PR flacks talk about how you can spin Jocelyn’s picture after her breakdown — “psychological sickness is horny,” one opines. And eventually, a full-blown publicity disaster emerges when a personal, express photograph of Jocelyn surfaces on-line, and her group tries to determine one of the simplest ways to deal with it earlier than breaking the information to her.
Picture: Eddy Chen/HBO
The primary half of “Pop Tarts & Rat Tales” has the beginnings of a compelling drama, maybe even a darkish comedy that’s like Veep with extra nudity: a cynical farce that casts everybody in an artist’s orbit — from managers to intimacy coordinators to finest buddies — as amoral vampires which have by some means made themselves essential to the human being they’re commodifying for revenue. (The episode’s most darkly humorous scene includes Jocelyn’s group making an attempt to find out the angle from which the leaked photograph was taken.)
Sadly, Tedros (Abel Tesfaye) arrives to take Jocelyn, and the viewers, away from that present. If the primary half of The Idol’s premiere is darkish Hollywood satire, the second half is the sleazy love story that the advertising and marketing promised, solely delivered with out a lot conviction. Tedros meets Jocelyn in a membership he owns, ominously lit your entire time whereas he whispers to her how she ought to be having far more enjoyable as an enormous pop star.
Picture: Eddy Chen/HBO
For Jocelyn, Tedros is a knife that cuts via the bullshit, an impulsive and devilish seducer who isn’t inquisitive about telling her what she desires to listen to. For the viewers, he’s an apparent manipulator with designs on inserting himself into Jocelyn’s life and artwork. Largely, nonetheless, he’s simply uninteresting, one thing that The Idol underlines in a scene the place Jocelyn is watching Primary Intuition along with her finest good friend Leia (Rachel Sennott) — a movie filled with the type of hazard and chemistry that The Idol can’t appear to search out in its two leads. Depp has the more durable of two lead roles, required by the script to be distant and considerably unknowable, however struggles in scenes with Tesfaye, who has no drawback taking part in sinister and enigmatic however can’t discover a technique to play up every other features of his character. If a technique of understanding on-screen sexuality is as a dialog between two characters bodily negotiating how a lot they wish to disclose to at least one one other, Tesfaye comes throughout like he’s lecturing, and Depp like a bored scholar.
Like The Weeknd’s trendy work, which is outlined by rigorously constructed characters and elaborate live shows calibrated in a tightly managed expertise, The Idol is simply too overengineered to really provoke, titillate, or begin a dialog. It surrounds its characters with mess however doesn’t present them being messy; its transgressions quantity to low cost jabs at progressives and its lead character having a kink. There might nonetheless be a superb TV present right here, perhaps. However proper now it simply appears like bait.
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