Hello angels … lol … for one last time I’ll do an Idol chat in the Substack app.
The Idol is a fantastic show about Da'Vine Joy Randolph trying to get a bunch of people who self-describe as “creatives” to turn anything in on time. It is an utterly mediocre show about nearly everything else: Hollywood, avarice, mansions that look decorated by W Hotels, cults of personality, pop music, ambition, loneliness, and rage. (I will concede that it is funny on profile writing, especially because it is co-created by someone who once sent me a three page single spaced word document in response to a secondary request.) The Idol wishes it were nasty and transgressive. It never gets past lukewarm.
The strongest part of the show is Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp, not always a self-assured performer, but selling it), the child star turned pop diva. She wants her Stripped, her Britney, her Rated R — she wants to be taken seriously, she says, but straight men only take women in pop seriously if they’re sexy (ideally -ier) in a different way than they were before. She’s surrounded by label handlers, friend-handlers, and general hangers-on; the environment is an ouroboros of indecision. She pays people to tell her what to do, they deliver directives as nebulous as her desires. But Jocelyn wants to be a star, or she’s wanted to be a star so long that she’s forgotten if she ever wanted anything else. It’s the best part of Depp’s performance, the way you feel Jocelyn contorting herself to meet her own shifting demands. But she’s a child star, remember, so when the spotlight turns on she knows to hit her mark, or there will be someone right behind her, giddy to replace her.
Enter Tedros (Abel Tesfaye), one long, bad Joe Pesci impression. He’s a club owner-cult leader-enabler, the senior still raising his hand asking “Why?” in seminar. He’s a striver — he mispronounced carte blanche, sure, but he knows that’s a phrase these industry people would know — and a dealer. He namedrops the music producer Mike Dean fifty times as many minutes. He’s not The Weeknd, but it sure seems like Jocelyn is a composite of pop stars who are mostly Selena Gomez, so maybe their relationship is not all that different. Tedros covets Jocelyn and exploits her story.
But that’s taking Tedros too seriously. This is not a real character: his “Just For Me” permed hair is braided into a rat tail, he’s throttling his John Gotti in Valentino dressing rooms, he screams at assistants and managers and talent, he fingers Jocelyn to climax during a recording session because a song needs “grit.” Watching Tesfaye act as Tedros is like being asked to watch a bad self-tape at gunpoint. This is a musician given, sure, cartay blanchay and remaking what could’ve been a fine pop fable into a character study. But neither Abel nor Tedros is much of a character. He rages and whines but he’s very clearly just a collection of capital-s Scenes: see Tedros yell at Troye Sivan, see Tedros beat Jocelyn, see Tedros make Rachel Sennott cry. Even if Tedros was played by someone truly scary (Jared Leto) or good at playing scary (Joaquin Phoenix) or good at playing someone who thinks they’re scary (Jake Gyllenhaal) there’s not a lot of there in Tedros, let’s say.
The Idol is a provocative parable about fame and Hollywood, or The Idol is an objectifying, objectionable, pornographic disgrace, or it is just half-baked outrage bait with decent music. (The latter.) I will never, ever be interested in any opinion about The Idol; I will always sprint to see every new and humiliating way the Weeknd defends this show, his passion project. Promoting a show is one thing. Going back and forth with people about it is another. I am a student of the Beyoncé Academy of Social Media, and lesson number one is that going back and forth with people online is raggedy. That appears to be all The Weeknd has time to do. Before I exceeded my rate limit on Twitter, I collected his greatest, most humiliating defenses of The Idol.
