The Idol

What an embarrassment.

This series got into hot water because director Amy Seimetz, who was supposed to direct this series, and tell this story from a feminist point of view of a girl being exploited by men and the music industry, left because of intense hostility from the cast and crew. Then Sam Levinson took over and turned into an exploitative torture porn fest. At least that's what the Rolling Stone magazine article said.

And boy were they correct on this one.

There appears to be a good, interesting story about the sleaziness of the music/movie industry and how it mistreats and exploits pop singers, reaching out to get heard. But it never gets the upper hand, and is more interested in showing its very young-looking female lead nude and performing gratuitous, pointless long sex scenes that add nothing to the story.

I don't think I can listen to the Weeknd's music anymore, as Tesfaye not only plays a horrifically sleazy nasty character in this (his acting is low-par and this is his first acting role) but he's also the producer on this show. And the series also uses his songs during the most extreme sex/sadomasochistic scenes. Like WTF?

Almost nothing is from Joslyn (Lily Rose Depp)'s point of view. Her inner thoughts and feelings and past are mostly told by other characters. The cringy, offensive dialogue is just there to shock, and therefore, it's tedious and vomit-inducing.

I'm sick to death of men in Hollywood doing this to female characters on screen. It was bad enough with Blonde and how they disrespected Marilyn Monroe. Now this?

Enough. You are not special, you are not edgy. You are just wrong and untalented.

Don't bother with this show, listen to the neg reviews it's really bad. There is no depth to any of the characters, even the decent veteran actors couldn't help that script. LRD is beautiful but the character is so poorly written im not sure even with her dads talent she could have done any better.

The Weekend was as bad in this as he is good at music.

The coolness was really lame and contrived like it was written by high school students with a big budget to make a series as an elevated school project.

I won't persevere and if you are reading this trust me when I say don't bother. Maybe for 5 mins if you are curious.

Rather than being over the top, explicit or hard to watch it ends up being dull and cringy.

The writing feels straight out of a WattPad fanfic, in fact, I've read better fanfic.

The show tries really hard to act like they know what they're doing with the cringe, but it ends up falling flat as nothing becomes of it. Just bad writing, boring story and terrible messages.

The 10 star reviews on here are very obviously faked to boost scores. There isn't one aspect about it, writing, acting, cinematography, controversy that would give it even a 5, let alone a 10.

Boring. Dull. Don't bother. Waste.

Ok so it looks good and Lily-Rose Depp is fine in her starring role, but other than that you have to wonder what is the point. What could have been an intriguing examination of how the entertainment business gobbles up and exploits young women becomes just another ugly example of creepy exploitation. Read the Rolling Stone expose to understand how it completely pivoted from its initial premise and got Euphoria-ised by Sam Levinson. What a disappointment. A funny review in the UK Telegraph about Idol, said Levison makes Showgirls look like a masterpiece. No wonder it was decried at Cannes as "luxury sleaze." Two thumbs down.

This gives me high school play vibes with lots of nudity, sex and shock value with absolutely no content. I think they thought they will just add a lot of famous last names to the mix and that will do it, but this is really bad. The plot is incredibly not interesting, the actors have very little to work with so no wonder that they come out as doing a bad job. But I don't know if any actor would save it. I was tired after 10 minutes, but I thought I would give it a benefit of a doubt. At 20 minutes something inside of me was breaking. It's clear now that Sam Levinson cares only about aesthetics which is not my kind of tea anyway and not much about content. The dialogs are like an AI idea of what a human dialog should be. This is really embarrassing for everyone involved.