So, my point. Based on all of this — the constant joking at the expense of the scandal mill and the people who get paid either to feed or defeat it, the casual assertion that what’s depicted in the photo is nbd (the real issue is that it got leaked, and that half her entourage is trying to treat it as a glass-half-full situation), the depiction of Tedros as a Kramer-esque goof who nonetheless has the kavorka — I have a hard time looking at The Idol as exploiting any of this behavior, let alone endorsing it. It seems pretty clear where the show stands on all that.
For example, can anyone take the ranting about intimacy coordinators being a pain in the ass done by Joss’s creative director Xander (Sivan) seriously, given that at no point are any of these people treated as being serious? Or his counterintuitive insistence that Joss breaking the intimacy rider already agreed to is about bodily autonomy, when he then spends the rest of the episode’s first act hiding some pretty important news involving her bodily autonomy from her? Again, I feel like this is all pretty clear.
None of this is to say that it isn’t sleazy as shit. Oh, it’s hugely sleazy! But it’s a familiar kind of sleaze: visually, sonically, thematically, locationally, in its use of comedy and nudity and perverse sex, this is an erotic thriller in the mode of the genre’s semi-satirists, Brian De Palma and Paul Verhoeven. The wider genre is very much in vogue at the moment, but despite watching a lot of horny television, I haven’t seen anything else working in this specific, spectacularly tasteless mold. I for one am all for it.What do you think? Be the first to comment.
Because given sufficient skill — and true, it takes a lot to reach sufficiency — you kind of can have your cake and eat it too with this stuff. You can, as Nikki says in her opening woke has gone mad–style monologue, “let people like sex, drugs, and hot girls,” while also making them uncomfortable with, and even making fun of them for, liking it. The real trick though, is to then make them sit with how being made to feel uncomfortable adds to their enjoyment.
I reviewed the first episode of The Idol for Decider.
Tags: decider, reviews, the idol, TV, TV reviews