‘The Idol’ Is Dead. Long Live ‘The Idol’

It’s only been a day since HBO collectively broke the world’s heart and announced that The Idol is no more. I don’t know about you, but I don’t know how I’ll ever recover. The finale painted the entire story into a corner, and I was very much looking forward to seeing how inartfully it would try to get out of it. Alas, now we’ll never know if showrunners Sam Levinson and Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye—two men of medium talent at best—would have employed bisexual vampire space robots in order to move the story along because HBO won’t let us have nice things. I am not OK with this news.

The Idol existed in a universe unto itself, and it was one of extreme smut and mediocrity. I loved every hamfisted moment of it. The fact that it took itself so seriously and presented itself as the smartest voice in the room, expecting the viewer’s mind to be completely blown when it was revealed—spoilers!—that main character Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp) was the mastermind behind everything, only added to its grandeur. I am a firm believer that one cannot set out to make an enduring piece of trash TV that is categorized as so-bad-it’s-good. One must stumble their way into such glory through utter incompetence, complete belief in one’s ability despite immense evidence to the contrary, and a tunnel-vision focus to take oneself—and by extension, the show—as completely seriously as possible. Winking at the camera is for hacks, or at the very least, someone who has a modicum of self-awareness, a quality The Idol was blatantly lacking.

As someone who loudly and proudly embraces the fact that I by no means have good taste, the passing of The Idol highlights a very real problem with television in 2023: everything feels like it has to be prestige appointment-viewing TV. There’s no room for trashy smut anymore. It was a breath of fresh air to have The Idol kick off with gratuitous nudity, terrible dialogue, and characters acting in ways that in no shape or manner represented the human condition. Even when the show tried to make you think deeply, it was fleeting and so poorly executed; whatever its intention, it had the opposite effect. I loved it.

Every decision made for the characters was inexplicable, and you never had time to dwell on it because it felt like half the things said, done, or mentioned never came up again. It was so good! Why was the main antagonist Tedros (Tesfaye) always picking fights and getting violent with people? Who knows! The show did not care to get into that; it wanted the cheap thrill and shock of sex, drugs, violence, and out-of-nowhere (and unearned) reveals. I wish we could have had eleventy-thousand seasons of it.

If The Idol were a person, it would be someone who keeps trying to provoke a reaction out of you by whatever means necessary, but without the attention span to keep it up. Instead using a “throw spaghetti at a wall” approach to see what gets your attention, and rather than following through on that, opting to simply grab more handfuls of metaphorical spaghetti to keep throwing at the wall. In reality, this type of person is boring and exhausting; embodied as a TV show, it’s fascinating in a rubbernecking-a-car-crash kind of way, and as I’ve said, one we’re not treated to often anymore. You never had to take The Idol too seriously, which in turn allowed you to marvel at how terrible and trashy it was. It was essentially a magic eye puzzle: once it clicked into focus and its trash tableau was revealed to you, you could stop trying to see the big picture and instead roll around in the mud of the stupid details it probably didn’t pay enough attention to in the first place.

There has been such a push to take the joyful horniness out of TV shows and replace it with boring, prudish nothingness that The Idol truly stood out during its brief inglorious run. Now, I don’t particularly crave nudity or gratuitous sex scenes in my shows (although I think they’re usually fun). I view it more as a canary in a coal mine: if it’s there, the chances of a show embracing its trashiness and having fun with it goes up exponentially. The Idol, for all of its flaws, absolutely embraced its trashiness, even if it was convinced it was doing it all in the name of art. (It was not, but there’s no need to kick the show while it’s down by calling too much attention to that fact.) What other show out there is doing that right now? This is not a metaphorical question—if you know of one, please find me and let me know, I very much would like to watch it.

There is no way a second season of The Idol would have been able to pull it out of the nose-dive trajectory it was on and fashion it into something actually good. If anything, it would have doubled down on being as ludicrous as possible and tried to ramp up everything that made it so terrible in the first place. A scene in space or underwater would not have been out of the question and might have been presented to us with all the subtlety of a freshman philosophy major in their first semester. Unfortunately, we’ll never know. That future has been stolen from us. The Idol is dead, but may it long live in infamy. To Tedros, and the entire stable of characters, I say: Good night, sweet prince. And may flights of screaming, trashy, neurotic pop-stars-turned-masterminds sing thee to thy rest.

(featured image: HBO)