HBO’s The Idol review: ‘Badly-acted, gratuitously sexualised trash – avoid it like the plague’

In this case, the apple appears to have rolled down a hill onto a busy road and been pulped by a passing truck.

Unlike her old man, Lily-Rose has the screen presence of a background extra or one of the props. She wears the same blank, dead-eyed expression throughout the first episode.

It’s often the only thing she wears, the script requiring her to be topless or scantily clad a lot of the time.

Critics weren’t provided with preview screeners of The Idol until 2am on Monday, when it was already airing simultaneously on HBO in the US and Sky Atlantic, which showed it again at 9pm.

This usually happens only with a big event, such as last week’s Succession finale, in order to avoid spoilers leaking out. Here, however, it seems to be a doomed attempt at damage limitation.

The only thing big about The Idol is the stink it’s caused so far. The first two episodes were shown at the Cannes Film Festival last month, to almost unanimously terrible reviews. All the negativity is justified.

The Idol is trash. It purports to show how the music industry sexualises and exploits vulnerable young women, while at the same time voyeuristically revelling in the sleaziness it’s supposed to be condemning.

Director Sam Levinson, the man behind envelope-pushing sex ‘n’ drugs teen drama Euphoria, lets the camera linger over Depp’s body. This isn’t just the male gaze; it’s the gaze of a sweaty teenage boy grunting over a porn site.

Depp plays Jocelyn, a Britney Spears-like pop star who’s still recovering from the twin blows of her mother’s death and her own breakdown.

She doesn’t have much confidence in her upcoming album, despite her hangers-on telling her it’s great. “I just don’t wanna, like, make a fool of myself,” she tells her personal assistant and best friend Leia (Rachel Sennott). “Everyone will, like, laugh at me.”

Believe me, there’s no danger of anyone laughing at The Idol. It’s not one of those so-bad-it’s-good things. It’s just bad.

In an opening segment that seems to go on as long as the wedding scenes in The Godfather, Jocelyn is posing and pouting her way through a sexy photoshoot when she suddenly decides to expose her breasts — nipple-flashing as female empowerment.

When a panicked intimacy coordinator points out that this goes against the “nudity rider” and that it would take 48 hours to amend, Jocelyn’s manager Chaim — Hank Azaria, speaking in an Israeli accent that should have been dumped into the bin along with his Apu voice — locks him in a bathroom and pays a guy €5,000 to keep him there.

All hell breaks loose when a sex pic of Jocelyn, her face smeared with a substance that’s definitely not moisturiser, goes viral. “It could be worse,” she shrugs.

It could be and it rapidly becomes so when Abel Tesfaye, the singer who calls himself The Weeknd, enters as Tedros, a club owner and, it seems, cult leader, who leaves a trail of slime behind him.

Tesfaye, who co-created the series and generously awards himself top billing, couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag and possesses the charisma of a brick, yet we’re expected to believe he’s an irresistible sex magnet rather than a common sleazeball or garden creep any smart woman would run a mile from.

Jocelyn won’t heed Leia’s warning. “He’s so rapey,” she tells her.

“Yeah,” giggles Jocelyn, “I kinda like that about him.”

Ugh!

These toxic fumes The Idol gives off rather than the controversial sex scenes — which put the “rot” in “erotic” and include a brief shot of Jocelyn masturbating with one hand while choking herself with the other — are the ugliest aspect of the whole thing.

Apparently, the series was already 80pc filmed when original director Amy Seimetz was replaced by Levinson, who did a complete overhaul, changing the cast and rewriting the scripts.

It was reported that Tesfaye felt it was “leaning too much into a female perspective”.

Well, you wouldn’t want a series about sexploitation of a female pop star to have a female perspective, would you?

One to be avoided at all costs.