The Idol Review

The Idol wants to be a story about how the machinery around a pop star consumes her, and it has the resources to be one: HBO money, a Cannes premiere, a cast built around Lily-Rose Depp. What it delivers is a show that confuses being explicit with being unsparing. Scene after scene is staged for shock and then left there, with no consequence, no reversal and no argument about what any of it means, so the transgression reads as decor.

Jocelyn's arc is the clearest failure. The series wants her to be both a victim of the industry and the manipulator running the whole scheme, and because it will not commit until the final minutes she has no legible want for four episodes, which leaves the story without an engine. Tedros is written as a magnetic operator and played without the control that would make the manipulation land, so the character comes across as a man issuing threats in a kitchen rather than one anybody would follow, and the gap between those two things is where the audience is lost for good.

Depp is not the problem. She is committed and precise, and she plays the few quiet scenes as though they came from the better version of this show. Levinson shoots beautifully, and the production design of Jocelyn's house is real work. The reshoot history is not an excuse but it is an explanation: a nearly finished series was scrapped and remade, and what reached air has the shape of something assembled twice and finished once.