The Idol recap: WTF is this show doing?

Can you build an entire series on vibes? Sam Levinson, of Euphoria fame, seems intent on bringing us along for a ride as we find out. With The Idol, the writer-director may be working on a more narrowly focused plot (we’re basically only following pop star Jocelyn and her relationship with mysterious manager/pop-star whisperer Tedros), but the very audiovisual sensibility of his latest series feels built less on narrative than on, well, vibes.

Some of those vibes ape and echo and refract music-video aesthetics. And others merely ape (and echo and refract and maybe merely reproduce?) the aesthetic of porn. And other, in true Idol way, do both at the same time. Indeed, there are some scenes here that all but demand we come up with a portmanteau that better captures what these disjointed scenes stitched together and recursively edited together drum up. (I’m going to suggest “Pornture” but we’ll get to that in a bit.)

Last we saw Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp, a blank canvas of an actress who nicely slots into the vacant hollowness The Idol demands of its leading lady), she’d been wooed by Tedros (Abel Tesfaye, a.k.a. The Weeknd). Turns out that the two, after a bit of erotic asphyxiation play, had remixed her upcoming single, presumably to better match the whole “we need to know you can fuck” vibe Tedros had wanted from her. The young starlet, eager to take control of her own narrative and career has gathered her team and hopes they’ll warm up to the breathy NSFW-sounding remixed single she’d begun assembling (which, yes, was all moans; apparently the way to suggest you can fuck on a song is to merely score it with sounds recorded during sex?).

Unsurprisingly, everyone is stunned by the song but it’s up to her manager Nikki (the deliciously deadpan Jane Adams) to tear her a new one as she basically says, “No.” Actually, her entire monologue may be the highlight of an episode that soon unravels into muddled nonsense. That may be a harsh assessment considering “Double Fantasy” commits to bringing us into Jocelyn’s headspace as she struggles to successfully film the music video for a song she wishes she could disavow (only, you know, her management team would ruin her, if ever so gently; theirs is a velvet glove, after all).

After spending three hours with makeup (to cover up cuts on her thighs) and all but voicing her distaste at the sets (which she’d absentmindedly approved in a breezy montage meant to showcase how alienated she feels in her palatial home), Jocelyn has a hard time nailing the choreography to her satisfaction. Only, rather than this being proof that she wants to be a serious artist who wants to be perfect (anyone else get Black Swan vibes?), all her protestations come off, instead, as that of a pouty tantruming toddler who has no control over her emotions, let alone the physical demands of a highly choreographed number at a strip club.

The dizzying, recursive editing that characterizes The Idol keeps us from staying with the scene as it’s happening. Instead, conversations between her team (about her self-harm), with the music video director (rightly losing her patience), and even with Jocelyn herself (who breaks down in tears, her grief getting the better of her, as she tells Hari Nef’s Talia, who in turn feigns compassion), are all blended together. I will say this about the episode: The vibes are immaculate. We don’t just witness a music video being shot; it feels like we’re inside a music video…and witnessing Behind The Music and watching a Making The Video episode and also scrolling through a fancam, maybe, all at the same time. It would be hypnotic if it didn’t feel so schematic and, well, so basic.

Well, and that’s before, in the middle of that visual melange, Levinson drops a glimpse of what Tedros is up to: apparently electrocuting Izaak (Moses Sumney) as he practices his sex-fueled gyrations in the presence of a slew of naked young women. Here again is The Idol borrowing heavily from porn as an aesthetic, if not altogether a genre, and then revealing how closely it aligns with manufactured pop music. There’s a vacuity to this comparison (it’s tired already by 2023, no?): The shots of Jocelyn breaking down as she is clearly in no way emotionally nor physically fit for the demands of her shoot are immediately equated to those of Izaak hurting from Tedros’ electroshocks. Here is yet another well-worn trope: hurting for your art. But here it’s mixed with porn (and not, decidedly, pleasure): This is “Pornture,” which is presented as the way to make great pop music: “If you wanna be a star you gotta push through the pain,” is what Jocelyn and Izaak are being told (literally, that’s an actual line of dialogue from the episode).

Only, Jocelyn doesn’t actually push through the pain. Even after nailing a great shot (ruined by a lens out of focus, naturally), she breaks down and gets just enough pity from her team to cancel the shoot for the day. And thus the episode moves from a music video to…a home-invasion scenario?

That may sound like a stretch but the way Levinson shoots the arrival of Tedros and his entourage (which includes not just Izaak but another ingenue by the name of Chloe, played by Suzanna Son) makes one feel like this is truly a terrifying if inevitable move on the part of the (maybe Hawaiian) Tedros. Forlorn about the music video-mishap, Jocelyn quickly implores Tedros to come by (after he’s basically been negging her for days); and no sooner has he arrived than Izaak (working on Jocelyn BFF Leia) and Chloe (stripping down to take a dip in Jocelyn’s pool) make themselves at home, spidery minions taking over spaces they’ll soon claim as their own.

Oh, but that’s all backdrop to yet another (intentionally?) unsexy sexual episode between Jocelyn and Tedros where she asks him to yet again tie up/blindfold her and boss her around. Again, that blurring of agency comes through here: Is she submitting to Tedros or is she thinking she’s in control because she’s chosen to submit? Those would be interesting questions were they not framed by laughable dialogue like “Show me how sexy you are” and “Make that throat wet for me.” Is it the point that these moments are so unsexy? That the audience can see right through Tedros’ hollow seduction? Maybe. But that just leaves those gratuitous moments of sex-as-empowerment feel equally hollow.

The fact that it all builds to Jocelyn basically agreeing to letting Tedros move in (how else will he help her revamp her image, her music, her entire life?) which is scored by Chloe’s stripped down song all about a broken family, means I’m yet again wondering WTF this show is doing. It’s a train wreck, yes. But I wish it were at all an enjoyable one.

Stray observations

• Okay, calling Troye Sivain’s character “Sarah Lawrence” is kind of genius.
• Also, I want to know everything about “Heartthrob Rob,” don’t you?
• Will I spend every recap just praising Rachel Sennott? Likely. But then, her reading of “I like the breathing in it” was the one moment I actually laughed out loud in this episode.
• For a show that really doesn’t want us to think this is a riff on Britney Spears’ career, that music video shoot sure had plenty of “Gimme More”/“Make Me” vibes. Also, Levinson can’t, in earnest, tell Jocelyn she’s the American Dream and not expect me to complete the line (“since I was seventeen, don’t matter if I step on the scene or sneak away to the Philippines…” from “Piece Of Me”).
• The Idol nails, better than anything else, the way Jocelyn’s team manipulates her into thinking she has agency; the way she feels in control even as she remains disempowered at every turn. This may be a wholly nihilistic vision of the music industry but that rings very true.
• The plot thickens! I forgot to mention how Dyanne (Jennie Kim) is about to get her big break after she wows Nikki, who wants to sign her. Only, in a TWIST I did not see coming: She’s working with Tedros! Who, we all know is like a cult leader, yes? Isaac all but calls him that when he notes he’s “godly.”
• One thing I unabashedly enjoy about The Idol? Its synth-y albeit incredibly pompous score.
• My hope is that everyone who enjoys Suzanna Son’s end of the episode moment will seek out Red Rocket, easily a more engaging and fascinating exploration of porn than whatever The Idol is offering up.