‘The Idol’ doesn’t understand pop

Begging on your knees to be popular.

Let’s start this of hot and nasty – Jocelyn is an absolutely unforgivable name to give a pop star. It reeks of mildew and lavender. This is the name of a long-dead aunt your mother remembers fondly, or the sickly child of a Victorian novel. There’s something so distinctly sexless in those seven letters, so old and damp, that you cannot pair it to a smooth cheek.

This is where the rot begins in ‘The Idol’, HBO’s failed gambit to take advantage of the current wave of Britney Spears apologia. Written by Sam Levinson (Euphoria, Malcom & Marie) and The Weeknd (Starboy, After Hours), this is the story of a blonde pop star who gets taken in emotionally and sexually by a cult leader whose purpose is to create art through torture. It’s not very good.

There’s a lot to say about this “erotic pop thriller” mini-series, cut down to five episodes following an astoundingly bad run of press, ratings, and music. It’s sexual, for starters. You see a lot of nipple and ass cheek, and even a random penis, although it isn’t attached to a character. But the sex stuff is not actually very interesting. The torture stuff isn’t either. There’s a hairbrush. Troye Sivan wears a shock collar. A man has an implied vibrating butt plug. You get the jist.

But through it all, the throughline is music. Art. The creation of pop persona and what it means to be popular. A subject that, theoretically, the man responsible for some of the 2010s biggest hits would know a little something about. He apparently does not.

Pop, as envisioned by ‘The Idol’, is crass and shallow. It’s subdued electronica, held together by a moaned chorus and the thump of a drum machine. Promoted with sexed up imagery that can only go so far against good taste.

Jocelyn (shudder) begins this all by prepping to promote her latest single, to restart her dying career and poorly selling tour. That song is ‘World Class Sinner’, a clear attempt at modernising and satirising ‘Gimme More’ in a way that clearly represents how little it gets the song. The concept itself is basically pulled from an unreleased Spears track. The issue here isn’t just that it’s obvious, or lazy, or poorly performed by Lily-Rose Depp. No, the problem is that nothing about this makes sense in 2023.

Let’s take a step back here.

‘The Idol’ is very pointedly taking cues from two women in pop culture: Britney Spears and Selena Gomez. The show name drops Spears in the first twenty minutes, dramatically comparing the real and fictional woman to force legitimacy onto the character. It’s ineffective, primarily because Gomez is the much more obvious example. From the medicine bracelet on her arm during her album photoshoot, to the makeup line she’s developing with her live-in assistant, you get the sense that The Weeknd’s entire show is built around his ex-girlfriend. But the key difference is, Selena Gomez is a real pop star who makes sense as a pop star. She’s earned her space. Jocelyn, by comparison, isn’t playing the game at all.

Social Media has been given a lot of credit in the past decade for “democratizing” fame, which is bullshit. It isn’t easier to become famous, except that the pathway has changed and the pay is worse. But something it supplies significant to being the type of young, rising star that Jocelyn apparently is. That something is access. Availability. Parasocial bonds. Persona ad infinitum.

At no point, until Tedros (ew) suggests it, is Jocelyn even suggested to do promo. Despite the tanking tour and money problems she clearly has, there’s no sense of action. We never see the woman take a selfie, or throw out a tweet, or look to someone to do that for her. This doesn’t feel like the type of person to have been ingrained in celebrity from a young age. She moves like she doesn’t know how to be famous. Which I get – that’s the initial premise. But the people around her also don’t seem to get it. When she eventually does a livestream, it’s to perform victimhood over her mother’s abuse.

That isn’t to say that there isn’t something there. I spoke in my Jesy Nelson article about the trend of pop stars building brands off of pain and suffering. But the woman doing this has done nothing like this in the previous 3 episodes. Even when surrounded by executives and marketing experts, they’re fine letting her do nothing in her mortgaged mansion. Pop stars don’t just get to do music anymore. Even for someone has allegedly established as this, you have to have a few pies to stick your finger in. That makeup line should already be out. She should have a homeware line.

And again – the music is bad. ‘World Class Sinner’ is meant to be a parody of the lamest “sexy” pop music, but it’s boring. When art makes fun of bad pop music, it’s typically maximalist bangers like ‘Why Did You Do That?’ from ‘A Star Is Born’ (2018). You throw theatrics against the wall and pretend that all pop music is a force of nature, even if it’s bad and tacky.

But ‘The Idol’ isn’t taking pointers from Lady Gaga, it’s trying to make Selena Gomez music. Lily-Rose Depp’s monotone delivery of “I’m just a freak, yeah” is weirdly in line with “I just want to look good for you, uh huh”, and this type of dark, muddied pop is straight off the 2017 radio. It fits between The Chainsmokers and, obviously, The Weeknd. Her more “experimental” stuff is basically cut from the same cloth. Because this show isn’t clear why people make and succeed in pop music.

Not even aesthetically.

A lot is made in the show about how beautiful Jocelyn is, and I’m not about to write a segment of my article about if Lily-Rose Depp is hot or not. But what I will say is she doesn’t look like a pop star. Nothing about her makes sense for the type of person she’s portraying. She’s this tall, willowy thing with giant cheeks and lifeless eyes, at least in how they’re shooting her. The costuming accentuates this weird, ethereal quality. Her costumes are revealing in ways that are fashionable, but not always appealing. And her hair is thin and sits strangely around her face. None of this is to say these are flaws. But this face and body, presented this way, does not look like a pop star. Particularly not when paired with the physicality.

Because there’s a way dancers move. Jocelyn lacks a certain grace, a certain sharpness. They claim she’s impossible to look away from but keep cutting to hide how poorly she’s doing. There’s no thought behind how her arms sway, how her back arches, how her feet sit. This may sound silly, but she moves like somebody who doesn’t perform for a living. Which is especially obvious when placed next to Dyanne, played by Jennie of BlackPink fame. There’s something wrong here, and it’s wrong from start to finish.

And again, there’s her voice. When she sings, it’s flat and lifeless, but when she talks…it’s also pretty dead. But even worse, it’s mildly goofy. There’s a quality to her speaking voice that brings to mind teen actresses like Maude Apatow and Maya Hawke. Not people known for playing swathe or even broadly appealing figures. They’re niche by nature, and so is she. It’s the type of miscast that will make some write long screeds about nepotism. But this happens all the time. She’s just not good in a bad role.

Even the best cast actresses in the world couldn’t make this script shake. There are moments, but nothing about this feels honest, or real, or even particularly interesting. It’s too short and bloated to be an interesting character study. Too enamoured with The Weeknd’s sad little cult leader to focus on the few fascinating moments of celebrity and industry it does bump into. It’s psychologically vapid and meaningless. The sex is as dull as the music.

But let’s branch out for a second…what about the soundtrack? The Weeknd is making music for the show – that has to be doing something! I’d respond by playing Madonna’s verse in the show’s one real stab at a hit, ‘Popular’. A titan of the industry, crooning about popularity, over a neat beat, inferring quality without actually providing it.

In short: why bother?

The Weeknd’s music is naturally cinematic, but the stuff he’s making for his own show reminds me way too much of ‘Earned It’, from the ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ soundtrack. That is to say, it’s obvious in a way his regular material isn’t. Or at least, his standard tracks don’t have an actual text to compare them to, making whatever ham-fisted quotations he’s using as lyrics too obvious. ‘Popular’ is the best and worst outcome. The chorus is “ominous” via being generic, and only the limited time Playboi Carti is given can really save it.

Because this is not a man who makes the type of pop music his show is about. He’s never really had to sell himself as part of the package. Mystery has obscured a significant chunk of his worst qualities, and yet here he is, shouting them for all to see. He clearly doesn’t understand or appreciate this side of the industry. Nor does Levinson. It’s just a bit of a shitshow.

Not a particularly entertaining one, either.