Immediate thoughts on The Idol’s season(?) finale.
I threw last night’s dinner on the pan and heated it up for less than two minutes. I slid it into a shallow bowl and walked it to my bed. There I sat, eating macaroni and cheese and a medium-done steak while I pressed play on the season (?) finale of The Idol. For an hour I sat there, taking one break to put the empty dish in the sink and to use the bathroom, wondering if there exists a world in which the show was any good, and why it wasn’t the one I was currently in.
Maybe you’ve never heard of The Idol. Well, good for you! Keep it that way!
Or, The Idol is//might still be who knows/was a show on HBO (can I still call it that?) made by the dude behind Euphoria and The Weeknd. It stars The Weeknd (sorry, Abel! that just has to be who you are to me!) and Lily-Rose Depp, Johnny Depp’s daughter (the paratext writes itself!). She plays “Joss,” a struggling pop star who had some kind of mental breakdown and is escaping the shadow of her abusive (maybe?) and dead Mother. She meets Tedros Tedros (played by the Weeknd), who “owns a club” and is shady as heck and moves into her mansion where they have a lot of weird, cringey sex and write awful pop songs together.
You could synopsize it more, but you don’t really need to. That’s about it! Five variations of exactly that! Except for the episode where Joss tells Tedros about how her Mom used to beat her with a hairbrush, so Tedros says something like “we’re going to face your fears,” so he beats her with the same hairbrush in order to inspire her to write more Sexy Hit Singles. After that she says “thank you for taking care of me,” which is ripped directly right out of the BDSM 101 books that 20-year olds will give their older, inexperienced partners. Put a heck of a lot of pins in that.
I have defended the show on numerous occasions, so outside of the Weeknd himself there are few people with more skin in this game (here would be a great time to make an easy joke about “well, except for all the people who spent the entire show either nude or extremely close to it,” but I guess I’ll be a better person than that). Though I will say that most of my defenses wasn’t even just “it’s good, actually.” It’s just that “it’s bad, but not the exact type of bad everyone is saying it is.” Like in the penultimate episode, where Tedros Tedros says “cartay blanchay.” That’s a dumb line, sure, but because it’s easy, not because “he didn’t know he was saying it wrong.” And yet that’s what most people yelled about! Or the way that people said “oh my God, doesn’t he know how creepy he is?” And just… yes, he does. He did. That was the point. Maybe he missed it in the long run, but “Tedros is Gross” was, at first, the point.
I told someone just today, “you know, in Showgirls there’s a scene where a woman says “oh, thank you, it’s Ver-sayce,” and they went “oh.” And obviously The Idol was just a sentient version of the pool scene from that movie. The Idol wanted to make Showgirls for a modern audience, that was clear from the get-go. It’s just… making Showgirls is hard. And it barely works— how long did it take before people realized Showgirls was supposed to be like that?
I know The Idol is supposed to be like this. It just wasn’t very good at doing that. And so I sit, trying to let the finale of The Idol last longer than last night’s warmed over dinner of which I have already emptied myself. There are simple questions, questions about screenwriting, like “so is Troye Sivan’s character Good or Evil? Whatever happened to Joss’ ex-boyfriend? Are Joss’ “Family” actually stoked that Tedros is back with Joss?” Or, maybe most important, who in God’s name decided this show needed a twist, that “actually Joss was lying about her Dead Mom Hitting Her With A Hairbrush,” (I guess?) and actually “loves Tedros Tedros so much,” and actually his whole downfall was just a manufactured setup to make a sultry punchline out of a BDSM relationship?
Someone I dated once told me about a BDSM relationship they were in. They described once a morning in which their Dom made them make him eggs for breakfast instead of letting them cum. I can’t wait for season two of The Idol where Joss has Tedros Tedros make her some eggs! Was the lengthy, clumsily-recapped-by-characters-instead-of-shown sequence of “Tedros Tedros is ruined by Joss’ PR team” supposed to be a joke setting this up? Because they’ve got egg in their face?
And was Joss really lying about having been beaten by her mom with a hairbrush? Or does she just buy the same brand? Was the entire thing her idea? Did she just really want to get hit by the hairbrush, but couldn’t figure out a better way to ask? Was she always “in control,” whatever the heck that means? There’s literally nothing in the entire show that supports this until the very end, but okay!
I am struggling here, to not ask the crucial, easy, simple question: what was this show about?
There was so much gas in the air about it, whether or not it was glorifying rape culture, or if it was just torture porn, or if it was stupid, or bad, or good, or if The Weeknd is a good actor or not (here, I’ll come down in at least one place: Yes, he is. He was better than Dan Levy was in this show. He made a lot of tiny decisions that led to making a terrible guy who abusively bumbled his way into power into a working character. The problem was that people just assumed “he’s playing himself,” because they hate him and they want it to be true). The arguments were louder than the show. That’s okay, that happens. It happens in all media. Most of the time it’s fine, it’s easy to ignore.
I’m starting to think one of the reasons it was hard to ignore here is because maybe, after all of the gas and yelling, The Idol was just about nothing. Maybe it thought it was. Maybe it thought it was trying to be edgy. Maybe it thought it was trying to be subversive (you can certainly feel every time it thought it was saying something “important” about the music business). It feels like Sam Levinson and The Weeknd also had a friend who once was in a BDSM relationship and told them about the time their Dom made them make him eggs for breakfast instead of letting them cum, and wrote an entire show around it. Look, I know there’s more to BDSM than that person's egg-story. It is just, to me, exactly as actually funny an example as this show was often accidentally funny.
There’s easy drama in power dynamics (that’s just storytelling), so it makes sense why someone would want to explore it, but this isn’t explored. It’s just there, like Moses Sumney’s rippling muscles are, or Joss’ constant cigs, or Hank Azaria’s They’re-Really-Letting-Him-Do-This-Again? accent. It’s all just the empty pieces of no whole. So instead of a sumptuously shot show about a young woman overcoming her demons in a hostile music industry, it crumples into every thing everyone ever said about it. It does feel like a rape fantasy— it’s just that in the end, it’s The Weeknd who was playing the victim all along. But that’s just… boring. Not that the show is boring for being just that. It’s boring that this is all I wind up having to say about it. That after five weeks of passing time with the show, with the world around me ending in fast motion, it was about nothing, and all I get to do is write a bad review.
Today it rained so hard geysers erupted from city streets. I watched a video where cars silently drove around a black void that would erupt rainwater. The water went back into the hole. You couldn’t see into the hole. Where did it come from? Where did all the water come from? The three days before the air quality was so bad you couldn’t go outside. You couldn’t see two blocks down the street from smoke. The feeling is starting to permeate that you just don’t get summer anymore. I’ve sat this last week, waiting for The Idol, because in a sense, well, what else was there?
In a world so bent on ending, maybe it is not unfair to ask more of our entertainments. Or, maybe it is not unfair to ask them to do better. You can be purposefully less. That is fine— there’s room for fluff in this world; if anything, we need it more than ever. But you have to commit to being nothing. If you claim you’re smart, and are so bad at it that you wind up as worse than fluff, then maybe it’s not unfair to feel a deep disappointment there.
Instead it all just runs together. The world is burning. Joss says “you’re mine forever, now stand over there.” Life as we know it is shifting into something worse. Joss’ handlers get egg in their faces for thinking Tedros was “taken care of.” Our children won’t get to grow up. The cycle of abuse keeps spinning. Cue applause, title card, music sting. We’ve been here before. We’ve done this already. We haven’t learned a thing.
Everything reflects the time in which it was made. What’s more perfect for today than this:
Actually? nothing will ever, ever change. You were stupid to believe it would.