When I was 12, I read Rock Star, my first Jackie Collins novel. In the 1980s, every suburban mum’s bedside table housed a copy. Life was pretty awful back then. Grown men would weep on the street carrying P45s in their hands, as unemployment soared. National assets were flogged in a Government bin sale. We were probably all going to die in a nuclear war. Collins’ trashy, flashy, indefensible classic about the LA music industry took you directly out of all that, into an alluring netherworld of farcical glamour, sex, drugs, rock’n’roll, betrayal and redemption.
To The Idol, then, a 2020s take on the same idea. You’ll have heard a lot about The Idol, the pet project of Canadian mope-pop superstar, The Weeknd, aka Abel Tesfaye, working with Sam ‘Euphoria’ Levinson. The Weeknd plays Tedros Tedros, a repulsive, sexually despicable Californian nightclub figure with a rat’s tail hairdo. Sort of Coachella in human form.
TT encounters Jocelyn – reigning queen nepo-baby, Lily-Rose Depp – a neurotic, model-gorgeous pop star on the backend of a nervous breakdown. They start a BDSM relationship drawn from the footprint of another old ‘80s favourite, 9 1/2 Weeks. Fucboi meets fuckup. What could possibly go right?
The Idol has been slammed, ridiculed and got on exactly the nerves it was precision designed to. Like its multiple predecessors, it’s weirdly, clunkily alive, often chilling, repellent in a way TV rarely manages.
Levinson is fully aware of its trash factor, from Tedros’ repeated floodlit entries to Jocelyn’s mansion (hello, symbolism), to the gratuitous masturbation scenes. If you don’t get it, he spells it out, with Tedros and Jocelyn sitting down to watch Basic Instinct and Showgirls’ Elisabeth Shue guest starring. The Idol has a built-in guidebook to its history of elite trash.
Unlike the dismal recent remakes of American Gigolo and Fatal Attraction, it has an unforgettable sense of itself, mostly down to Depp, whose global megastardom is teed up perfectly by the show. The wardrobe department is on fire, like a sumptuous leftfield fashion title come to life. Figuring out that Jocelyn is not supposed to be a fictitious Britney, as heavily pre-cursed, but rather Miley Cyrus, is a whole reddit thread of its own. It’s a wonky, febrile work, a deliberate provocation laid out for arbiters of fake morality. I suspect Ms Collins (RIP) would’ve adored it.
The Idol continues Mondays, 9pm, Sky Atlantic
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