HBO’s The Idol is a very unsexy show about sex

This year, few shows have been hyped up as well as The Idol, HBO’s sleek new drama from Euphoria creator Sam Levinson and Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye. The series was discussed and advertised in the most sensational way over the last couple of months. Billed by HBO as a “twisted, turbulent love story,” trailers dropped with tone-setting lines like “When was the last truly fucking nasty-nasty bad pop girl?” The show premiered at the Cannes Film Festival — a statement in itself — and reports from the festival cast the show as a work of shock jock lasciviousness. The IdolIt was, as it appeared, a scandal disguised in a high-profile drama.

It’s much less interesting in reality.

“Pop Tarts & Rat Tales,” The Idol’s premiere, is split in two parts: The first half reads like a one-act play about Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp), a mononymous pop star on the day of a full-blown PR crisis. The best The Idolhas to offers. Across the show’s opening 30 minutes, viewers learn that Jocelyn is attempting to mount a comeback after a nervous breakdown led her to cancel a tour.

Over the course of an afternoon, Jocelyn does a risqué photo shoot, rehearses the choreography for her new single’s music video, and sits for an interview with Vanity Fair. While she’s doing this, behind her, all the wheels of celebrity are turning. The intimacy coordinator and manager have a slapstick argument over the nudity of the shoot. PR flack discuss how to spin Jocelyn’s image after her breakdown — “mental illness is sexy,” one opines. Finally, the full-blown crisis is triggered when an explicit, private photo of Jocelyn appears online. Her team must decide how to best handle the situation before telling her.

Photo: Eddy Chen/HBO

The first half of “Pop Tarts & Rat Tales” has the beginnings of a compelling drama, perhaps even a dark comedy that’s like Veep with more nudity: a cynical farce that casts everyone in an artist’s orbit — from managers to intimacy coordinators to best friends — as amoral vampires that have somehow made themselves necessary to the human being they are commodifying for profit. (The episode’s most darkly funny scene involves Jocelyn’s team trying to determine the angle from which the leaked photo was taken.)

Tedros (Abel Tesfaye), arrives to steal Jocelyn and the audience away from that performance. The first half is a good start. The Idol’s premiere is dark Hollywood satire, the second half is the sleazy love story that the marketing promised, only delivered without much conviction. Tedros and Jocelyn meet in the club that he runs, which is ominously illuminated throughout. He whispers about how Jocelyn should have more fun being a pop superstar.

Photo: Eddy Chen/HBO

For Jocelyn, Tedros is a knife that cuts through the bullshit, an impulsive and devilish seducer who isn’t interested in telling her what she wants to hear. For the audience, he’s an obvious manipulator with designs on inserting himself into Jocelyn’s life and art. Mostly, however, he’s just dull, something that The IdolUnderlines are used in scenes where Jocelyn watches Basic Instinct with her best friend Leia (Rachel Sennott) — a film full of the kind of danger and chemistry The IdolThe two main characters are unable to connect. Depp has the harder of two lead roles, required by the script to be distant and somewhat unknowable, but struggles in scenes with Tesfaye, who has no problem playing sinister and enigmatic but can’t find a way to play up any other aspects of his character. If one way of understanding on-screen sexuality is as a conversation between two characters physically negotiating how much they want to disclose to one another, Tesfaye comes across like he’s lecturing, and Depp like a bored student.

Like The Weeknd’s modern work, which is defined by carefully constructed characters and elaborate concerts calibrated in a tightly controlled experience, The Idol It is overly-engineered and cannot provoke, titillate or spark a discussion. It surrounds its characters with mess but doesn’t show them being messy; its transgressions amount to cheap jabs at progressives and its lead character having a kink. Maybe there’s still a decent TV show in this. Right now, it feels more like bait.