‘The Idol’ Series Premiere Recap: The Harder They Come

The Idol’s secret weapon, and I mean so secret I hadn’t heard so much as a word about it despite all the foofaraw surrounding this show, is that it’s funny. 

That likely won’t be the focus for many people, and I get it. The core, or at the very least the selling point, of the show is the budding bad romance between Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp), a pop star in need of a comeback, and Tedros (Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye), a club owner she meets by chance the night a photo leaks of her with cum on her face. (Hey, we all watched the show, we’re adults here.) 

Tedros is a weird guy with a cheesy affect, a true believer’s love of pop music, and a sexual magnetism that’s somehow harder to resist for how easy it is to see right through. I mean, the episode ends with him rectifying his critique of her singing voice by erotically asphyxiating her, jabbing a knife through the fabric covering her mouth to slice it open, and telling her “Now you can sing.” Whether that appalls you or turns you on, it’s gonna make an impression.

But one-third of this series premiere (“Pop Tarts & Rat Tales”), which really pissed ‘em off at Cannes, is a light farce, in which a handful of broad comedic characters in Jocelyn’s inner circle, all played by people who look like they’re having a good time, conspire amongst themselves to keep Joss’s phone away from until they strategize a response to the leak, field the arrival of a Vanity Fair reporter and a top Live Nation executive, prevent an intimacy coordinator from doing his job at a suddenly-topless photoshoot, and indulge in irony and ribaldry generally. 

And this is hard to articulate, but unlike certain cringe comedies about the very wealthy in this vein, your White Lotuses and what have you, every single joke doesn’t seem like it’s in a hurry to beat you over the head with how awful these people are. The awfulness just kind of emerges organically from the manipulative crap they’re all trying to do while the jokes get told. That is to say, it’s a bunch of funny assholes playing phone keepaway from their boss until they can figure out how best to profit off her misfortune.

Jane Adams is the real standout here as Nikki, a gleefully profane and cynical record company executive who kicks off the episode by talking about how sexy mental illness is (after all, it’s the only way any woman as famous as Jocelyn would ever sleep with any of the regular joes who lust after her). Her responses to the video range from calling Jocelyn a “brazen little minx” to wondering aloud about what’s going on in this society when you can’t enjoy a good old-fashioned facial anymore: “Didn’t that used to be fun? Wasn’t that a hot date, years ago?” Joss’s plight prompts Nikki to reminisce about “getting fucked in the ass in the Capitol Records building stairwell and then walking straight into meetings” when she was the star’s age; “Yeah, I remember,” groans Eli Roth’s concert-biz bigwig character Andrew Finkelstein. “I was the one fucking you.”

Actually, now that I think about it, the jokes pretty much all serve to minimize the alleged gravity of what Joss actually did, i.e. nothing wrong, and to snipe at the whole PR and press ecosystem that feeds off such scandals. When Joss’s managers Chaim (Hank Azaria) and Destiny (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) discuss the photo and he wonders why she’d do this, Destiny replies simply “He was probably fine as shit, he had a big-ass dick, and it felt good.” Simple as! Hari Nef’s journalist character Talia gets referred to by the proudly cancellable Nikki as making her feel like she’s “in Communist China,” while she has a subtly catty back and forth with Joss’s publicist, played by Dan Levy: “Joss, meet Talia from Vanity Fair, one of the great pop-culture writers.” “I do profiles.” “Oh, we do profiles!”

This whole tendency caps off with Joss’s reaction when they finally do relent and show her (and us) the photo: “…I mean, I feel like it could be a lot worse.” All this build-up, just to be waved away in two seconds? Deftly done. And while everyone agrees with her because they’re sycophants, she’s also, like, right? It really could be a lot worse!

I have a point to make here, but first I want to tie in something else I hadn’t heard about the show but which is, in a way, related to all the piss-taking gags: Tedros is presented as…kind of a dork. Thanks to the way this episode introduces us to his character, he will forever be associated with the phrase “rat tail” — not exactly what you want to do if you want to present some malevolent figure as a symbol of glamour. Ditto the way we watch him rehearse saying “Hello angel” to Jocelyn, a line so corny she laughs at it no matter how hard he practiced in advance. 

On it goes from there. His goofy black trenchcoat. His frustrated use of the phrase “boner-killer” when his initial stairwell hookup with Joss is interrupted by her assistant-slash-bestie Leia (Rachel Sennott). His whole extravagantly sleazy Hollywood-vampire vibe, which Leia describes as “a little rapey,” only for Joss to joke that she kinda likes that. (Note that writer-director Sam Levinson is working off a story he developed with co-creators Reza Fahim and Tesfaye himself — and by the way, studios, pay your writers — so everyone involved in the final product seems in on the joke.)

So, my point. Based on all of this — the constant joking at the expense of the scandal mill and the people who get paid either to feed or defeat it, the casual assertion that what’s depicted in the photo is nbd (the real issue is that it got leaked, and that half her entourage is trying to treat it as a glass-half-full situation), the depiction of Tedros as a Kramer-esque goof who nonetheless has the kavorka — I have a hard time looking at The Idol as exploiting any of this behavior, let alone endorsing it. It seems pretty clear where the show stands on all that. 

For example, can anyone take the ranting about intimacy coordinators being a pain in the ass done by Joss’s creative director Xander (Troye Sivan) seriously, given that at no point are any of these people treated as being serious? Or his counterintuitive insistence that Joss breaking the intimacy rider already agreed to is about bodily autonomy, when he then spends the rest of the episode’s first act hiding some pretty important news involving her bodily autonomy from her? Again, I feel like this is all pretty clear.

None of this is to say that it isn’t sleazy as shit. Oh, it’s hugely sleazy! But it’s a familiar kind of sleaze. Visually, sonically, thematically, locationally, in its use of comedy and nudity and perverse sex, this is an erotic thriller in the mode of the genre’s semi-satirists, Brian De Palma and Paul Verhoeven. The wider genre is very much in vogue at the moment, but despite watching a lot of horny television, I haven’t seen anything else working in this specific, spectacularly tasteless mold. I for one am all for it.

Because given sufficient skill — and true, it takes a lot to reach sufficiency — you kind of can have your cake and eat it too with this stuff. You can, as Nikki says in her opening woke has gone mad–style monologue, “let people like sex, drugs, and hot girls,” while also making them uncomfortable with, and even making fun of them for, liking it. The real trick though, is to then make them sit with how being made to feel uncomfortable adds to their enjoyment. 

It’s an echo of the way Joss falls for Tedros, you know? Here’s a woman who’s surrounded by people who make money off her from the moment she wakes up nearly to the moment she goes to sleep; the first time she has her house to herself she jerks off pretty much immediately, since when else would she have the chance? Now she comes across a guy who’s really got no business inserting himself into her world, but he believes in himself, since to be that odd, you kind of have to. He talks up the value and virtue of pop at a time when her belief in it and herself is at a low ebb. 

And, yes, he breaks out the knifeplay on the first date. In art as in life, tweaking your nose at the taboo can be a thrill, a nice place to visit. The question both Joss and the audience have to ask is whether you want to live there. Fortunately, that’s the question the show appears to be asking too.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.