THE IDOL
★★
OUT NOW (SKY/NOW) / EPISODES VIEWED 2 OF 6
SHOWRUNNER Sam Levinson
CAST Abel Tesfaye, Lily-Rose Depp, Suzanna Son, Jane Adams
“Who among us has not had cum on their face?” So asks Jane Adams in the opening episode of The Idol, the latest ode to excess from Euphoria’s Sam Levinson, about pop star Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp) who begins a toxic relationship with self-help guru Tedros (Abel ‘The Weeknd’ Tesfaye). According to Tesfaye, an earlier version of the show was “leaning too much into a female perspective”. Well, that’s certainly not an issue anymore. By the end of the first episode, Jocelyn has no perspective at all; as we see when she masturbates with an ice cube and chokes herself, this is (at least, in the writers’ minds) what women want. Like that ice cube, The Idol starts out strong but soon melts away after some mild provocation.