Immediately after the first two episodes of this five-part mini-series were shown in Cannes, critics cut “The Idol” down. And indeed, it turned out to be even worse than I suspected, and the son of the famous director Barry Levinson, who apparently hit the mark with the popular “Euphoria”, Sam Levinson, missed badly this time. Admittedly, the supposedly popular singer Abel Tesfaye, a tweeter with the stage name Vikend, who decided to assign himself the second most important role, takes more credit for that disaster.
His sleazy Tedros appears sometime towards the end of the first episode and the rat-tailed rascal will completely bewitch a young singer in a major crisis. Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp, daughter of Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis) is in a creative and psychological crisis. She became a star as a child, and had a mental breakdown after the death of her mother, who was also her manager and everything. And she would like to change her status from a pop star that six-year-old girls listen to, to become a sex symbol, and she is one of the typical perpetually half-naked sluts who twirls her ass and hums some numbers in videos.
She, or rather the whole army of people around her, is planning Jocelyn’s comeback tour and new album, but she is not satisfied and would like a new expression and a new sound, a sexy style, and then the fatal rat Tedros will appear. If that antipathetic tweeter was obviously not so in love with himself and if he wasn’t such an ego tripper, and if he had hired an actor for the role of Tedros, “The Idol” might have gotten a slightly higher rating. But like this, not only is everything we see here incredibly stupid, but we have a fatal guy who has managed to gather a cult around himself, and in fact he is a guy who no one with a quarter of a brain would let guard a small flock of sheep.
Such an imbecile cult leader who gathered around him several incredibly talented young musicians would not be smoked even by the stupidest Americans, young Jocelyn will be smoked (and literally!) too, and with the help of this semi-retarded self-help guru, she will record a new album. I even got the impression that “The Idol” tried to dig deeper and show not only what the background of the lives of stars like Jocelyn looks like, but also what the dark side of fame looks like and what lies beneath the surface, but it was done amazingly poorly. When it seems for a second that it could be intriguing, it becomes this series that is stunningly bad and stupid, full of unconvincing and nonsensical twists and turns.
The pinnacle of idiocy is the last episode and its very ending, after which the viewer wonders who is quratz to all these people? From the very beginning it’s on the level of some soft-porn and poor little Johnny spends almost half of the time (at least) semi-naked and regardless of the fact that Lily-Rose is actually one of the strongest assets of the series and she succeeded from Jocelyn (at least until the end of the series) to create a character that could really be a similar real singer like Rihanna or whatever pop stars are called. But it’s all in vain, because the whole story is completely blown up with the completely meaningless relationship between her and the idiot Tedros, and it’s complete idiocy that anyone, even such an unstable singer, could fall under the influence of such an idiot.
It’s hard to figure out what was the intention of this series and what did the poet want to say? Was it his wish to give the viewer an insight into the background life of celebrities and what the world of show business looks like from the inside and what is happening outside of that three-minute clip filled with beautiful, young people who move their asses and sing to playback? Was all this intentional trash, perhaps a miserable and failed attempt at satire on the world of showbiz, I wouldn’t even rule that out, because this seems almost like a bizarre exploitation on the level of those Italian semi-porn from the seventies, which is even a little uncomfortable to watch ? What Mr. Vikend wanted to say with this series still remains a great mystery, but the mystery is not that it was very, very bad.