This Should Have Been a No-Brainer

This Should Have Been a No-Brainer,The Idol is a series conceptualized by Sam Levinson and the Weeknd, one of this decade’s most successful pop stars. It should’ve been a no-brainer, an easy pairing of complementary sensibilities. How could this be choppy?

This Should Have Been a No-Brainer

The best Weeknd songs are expeditions into the bleary morality of the middle of the night, a conflict between wise inklings and disastrous impulses. Anything could happen in “The Morning,” for the right price, but you pay in pain for overindulging: “The higher that I climb, the harder I’mma drop.” “Gasoline” circles the abyss before dawn, rebuffing its “obsessing over aftermaths, apocalypse, and hopelessness” via the affirming immediacy of physical contact. Like the old Strokes song “Alone, Together” — “Life seems unreal, can we go back to your place?” — Abel Tesfaye is only ever trying to squeeze the juice from a lemon, to find the fun in increasingly strange times. The singing career took off after he gave up trying to write sexy, spooky songs for other artists and performed it all himself, releasing slippery, somnambulant, genre-bending R&B as an enigma people couldn’t quickly match a face to and relishing raunchy, uninhibited late-night scenes like a demon on the listener’s shoulder. It was, like any early-2010s success, an extended performance of exquisite taste, a well-balanced palette of samples and a melange of genres. Music videos added another dimension: The smoky “Wicked Games” video is moonlit noir; “The Knowing” balanced Afrofuturism and an homage to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker.

Sam Levinson’s work lurks down similar avenues. Assassination Nation is a minefield of clandestine urges and cavernous synth and trap-drum productions, and Euphoria is a zoomer story with ’90s Larry Clark vapors. Levinson is not so much working in genres as through them, transforming high-school dramas into crime stories and revenge epics, remaining abreast of present-day pathologies but keenly aware of the classics in the same way the Weeknd’s Trilogy seemed observant of both 20th-century R&B and aughts indie rock. The highs and lows of Euphoria’s Rue are a mirror on the quest for oblivion and the skirting of danger in “Gasoline” and “The Morning.” Tesfaye and Levinson (and HBO and A24) make sense together. They’re playing the same game of chicken, concocting scenarios capable of titillating or terrifying. What doesn’t make sense is how difficult it is to watch The Idol — a series conceptualized by the director of one of the most talked-about TV shows of the last four years and one of this decade’s most successful pop stars. It should’ve been a no-brainer, an easy pairing of complementary sensibilities. How could this be choppy?

The Idol tracks the reinvention of Jocelyn, a vacant but determined pop star staging a comeback after a breakdown sparked by tragedies including the death of her mother. Played by Lily-Rose Depp, Jocelyn has a sharp sense of what people want from her and a nagging itch to stop playing ball. Like Miley Cyrus in Black Mirror’s “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too,” the singer has grown disillusioned with the prefabricated image and cloying music that endeared her to a generation of teenagers, but emotional and financial debts to the members of her inner circle who swooped in to restore order as she lost control are keeping her nose to the grind. The Idol lures you in with the observation that the music business is a machine that stops for no one and nothing. A battery of album-rollout action — practice for the dance routine in a new music video, an interview for a Vanity Fair profile, and reassurances for Live Nation brass getting anxious about ticket sales — dovetails with a leak of a sexually compromising photo that threatens to demolish the artist’s poise in a week where she needs to exude perseverance and bankability. The pressure to get the performer back on the road to turn a profit and the rush to create a package of obvious hits to drive sales, coupled with the laugh of the management team buzzing around the writer (Hari Nef) to talk up the forthcoming single no one much cares for, suggest a cynical trip through rooms fans never get to set foot in, where pop and flop eras are conceived. But The Idol isn’t interested in the music-business palace intrigue Vinyl attempted; it doesn’t want to be pop-star Entourage.

Jocelyn’s musical evolution is really a sexual awakening. After her privacy is violated, she goes out with a friend and meets Tedros, a mysterious club owner who dresses like one of John Carpenter’s vampires but more importantly radiates a specific lasciviousness she craves on that fateful night. He spends the majority of the series icing out her friends and business associates one by one, exerting greater influence over her affairs and inviting her to raunchier sex in increasingly bizarre circumstances, all of this to coax out more passionate vocal performances. He felt the delivery on her new single “I’m a Freak” was too wooden; it turns out he is a sexually and psychologically manipulative Svengali whose methods, The Idol stresses, do work. Yes, he’s torching money, sabotaging relationships, and exposing her private pain to people she just met, but no one ever indulged Jocelyn’s innermost desire to make spooky, sexy R&B.

The logic of the show is odd. Tedros cites Donna Summer as an example of an artist who sang as if “she knows how to fuck,” a likely reference to the disco icon’s “Love to Love You, Baby,” the 1975 single banned in the U.K. and denounced as “sex rock” by Time magazine for a sensual vocal Summer famously achieved by pretending to be Marilyn Monroe. Tedros uses blindfolds, electric shocks, and knife play with his subjects to get the same results, but the new Jocelyn music isn’t more fulfilling than the old stuff. “Fill the Void,” a narcotized pop-trap banger, replaces the Pussycat Dolls vibes of “World Class Sinner / I’m a Freak,” which Jocelyn hated because the lyrics — “Bettеr have a bank account / If you wanna see what I’m about / I’m a good girl gone bad / Gеt in that car, drive fast” — sounded too vapid. But “Void” does not solve the problem. “I don’t wanna decide things for myself, on my own,” it states in the first verse. “Be my voice, and I choose you to fill the void.” (“One of the Girls” is a dom/sub duet between Tesfaye and Depp in character where he sings “Tell nobody I control you,” and she eventually sings “Tear me down, snuff me out.”)

It’s hard to place Jocelyn chronologically — her story has similarities to difficulties experienced by Selena Gomez some years back but she also conjures mid-aughts Britney Spears, and “Void” sounds like 2012 Lana. (Joss’s team doesn’t think depressing pop is commercially viable, yet the show operates in an era where trending topics ruin lives and people know Mike Dean from Ye beats, so it’s strange to think there wouldn’t be an audience for cinematic sadness and trap-and-pop blends.) The show seems much more interested in gawking at Joss’s pain than guiding her through it. Putting her through a violent act using a token of her mother’s abuse tips The Idol into torture-porn territory, revealing its core flaw: This isn’t so much a story about Jocelyn as it is a lurid account of carefully closing in and eating her up, like a shark circling its prey.

It seems like the braintrust behind The Idol indulged each other’s worst creative tendencies.

Like its own protagonist, The Idol is often catastrophically horny, and it’s impossible to settle into the show’s racy eye with Tedros systematically dismantling Joss’s friend group and business organization while running a textbook DARVO defense. The balance of power is askew. Our idol quickly becomes Tedros’s thrall, and we’re made to believe it’s improving the quality of her art. This makes the show feel like classic late-night premium-television soft-core, the stuff that comes up when people reduce the complexity of Euphoria or Trilogy to the wildest pull quote or plot point. The Idol doesn’t know if it wants to be a Fifty Shades or a Funny Games. Much of the action takes place inside Jocelyn’s house, where Tedros and his sex cult install themselves while they prime her as a vessel for the creation of new, raw, honest pop music via elaborate mind games. It feels like Joss is experiencing the birth pains of the Weeknd’s music career, though, bailing on a predictable path and working blue instead, but we only get to see her sing lightweight bops about cruising for a wild time. Elsewhere, as Tesfaye and Mike Dean sync up for chilly synth-pop and R&B hybrids like “Take Me Back” and “Double Fantasy” with Future, and Moses Sumney drops the solo scorcher “B4,” the show makes good on its musical star power.

Tedros is like a manifestation of whatever monsters lurk in the darkest corners of Tesfaye’s songs — “Crew Love,” “Initiation,” “Life of the Party,” “Escape from LA” — and it’s difficult to get a sense of the human beneath all of the cajoling and ordering everyone around. He’s more of a device than a person, a means of coaxing everyone out of their clothes and into their feelings, and dispensing line readings as matter-of-fact as Pornhub comment sections: “Imagine my tongue on your pussy — my fat tongue.” “I want to grab you by the ass while I suffocate you with my cock.” The dirty talk is distractingly funny, and the humor (see: Hank Azaria riffing on “bukkake” and announcing he’s “shitting more blood than a kid on Epstein’s island”) is eager to shock. The sex is too wrapped up in the takeover plot to feel spontaneous. Even as Joss’s best friend shacks up with Sumney, it feels like the greater goal is throwing her off the scent of Tedros’s treachery. It’s hard to know what Jocelyn is getting out of these hangers-on that she couldn’t find anywhere else on the planet for less stress, a point driven home late in the series when a rich ex comes back around and offers a luxury flight to another life. It’s not implausible for a well-known musician to get ensnared by a power hungry leech with a charismatic creative vision who sees her as a muse and a meal ticket. It’s just very slimy to luxuriate in her misfortune, foreground the emotional abuse and nerve-wracking sexual coercion happening in view of a panopticon of eyes, and float the idea that actually she enjoys it.

The Idol seeks what Eyes Wide Shut, The Dreamers, and Mandy found — turbulent stories made all the more rocky by an intense undercurrent of sensuality whisking characters together and apart — but it plays out just as much like a Lifetime film about a boyfriend with abusive tendencies and a dark past. It comes as a surprise from Tesfaye, who has great taste in music and films and a natural ability to synthesize his inspirations into work that bridges demographics. It seems like the braintrust behind The Idol indulged each other’s worst creative tendencies and told a story that’s drunk on the darkness and exploitation their other work has always touched on. It’s a haunted first flight for Tesfaye as a leading man, but like Bad Bunny — a successful WWE performer in addition to being one of the most streamed artists on the planet — there is the sense that he’s doing this because he loves to and not because he needs to. He’ll be back.