It’s undeniably seedy – but is the show a ‘toxic man’s fantasy’, as critics have said? Or is it a candid look at sex today? As 2023’s most controversial series hits our screens, we meets its stars
Months before it had even come out, The Idol was the year’s most controversial TV show. In March, Rolling Stone published an exposé featuring anonymous interviews with those working on the Lily-Rose Depp-starring HBO show, who alleged that its producers – megastar musician Abel Tesfaye, AKA the Weeknd, who also plays a lecherous nightclub owner/cult leader called Tedros, and Euphoria’s Sam Levinson – had burned through time and money to make a series “about a man who gets to abuse this woman and she loves it.”
Following a pop star named Jocelyn (Depp) as she tries to mount a career comeback after a mental breakdown, The Idol is self-consciously pulpy and undeniably sordid: characters talk about wanting to make “giant fucking big-titted hits”, lock intimacy coordinators in closets, and say over-the-top things such as: “Will you let people enjoy sex, drugs and hot girls? Stop trying to cockblock America.” Depp spends much of the first episode topless, and the series is littered with allusions to contentious cult auteurs such as Paul Verhoeven and Gaspar Noé. When the first two episodes premiered at Cannes earlier this month, critics slammed it as a “toxic man’s fantasy”; for a moment, its Rotten Tomatoes rating was hovering around an almost unheard-of 9% (it now sits at 25%).
