Steven Armstrong delves into the controversy raging over the Weeknd’s new HBO show
The Idol is so far ahead in the “most controversial television programme of the year” competition that it’s hard to see how any other show could catch up. The show’s creators – Abel Tesfaye, previously and amusingly known as The Weeknd, and director Sam Levinson – claim the barrage of erotic visual stimulation starring Tesfaye and nepo baby Lily-Rose Depp, daughter of Johnny and 80s pop starlet Vanessa Paradis, is a satire of the music industry.
Depp’s fading pop superstar Jocelyn falls under the spell of Tesfaye’s mysterious nightclub owner and cultist Tedros, who trains her to infuse erotic energy into her act in order to relaunch her career. In post-R Kelly and NXIVM sex cult days, the whole set-up is a bit ick.
Indeed, 13 members of the cast and crew have confided to Rolling Stone that the atmosphere on set didn’t feel like satire. One said they’d “signed up for a dark satire of fame and the fame model in the 21st century,” only to find it had gone from “satire to the thing it was satirising”. “It was like sexual torture porn,” added another.
So what? Sam Levinson is Hollywood’s most valued teen whisperer, another nepo baby whose dad is Men in Black director Barry Levinson, and the man who pulled in Gen Zs by the truckload with the drug-soaked high school drama Euphoria.
The writing was on the wall. He’s like a cross between Bret Easton Ellis and Quentin Tarantino – if they actually lived like their characters do. Levinson, for instance, checked into rehab at 19 to “get off opiates and on a more productive drug like crystal meth” because he found it hard to write on the former and thought the latter would give him focus.
But who’d let him behind a camera? HBO. Euphoria pulled in the second-highest ratings after Game of Thrones plus that hard-to-reach youth demographic. Sam’s resulting carte blanche included sacking The Idol’s first director, feminist filmmaker Amy Seimetz, because Mr Weeknd felt the show was leaning too far into the “female perspective”.
Shock tactics. The first episode of Euphoria season two contains three penis shots, one erect; a drug-dealing grandmother; a girl shooting up in a car; sex in a bathroom; a near-overdose on opioids averted by snorting Adderall and a baby eating cigarette butts. It’s set in a high school.
It wins awards. Euphoria star Zendaya is the youngest lead drama actress Emmy winner, only the second black woman to pick up the gong. Depp describes Levinson as “the best director I have ever worked with.”
Idolising it. Tesfaye and Levinson’s batshit crazy nihilistic hot mess premiered at last week’s Cannes Film Festival. An unscientific poll of Gen Z Euphoria fans rated it as “shocking but we’ll probably watch it.”
The Idol launches on Monday 5 June on Sky Atlantic
Photograph Home Box Office
