The idea that we hoi polloi see the ruling class who lord over us as louche, overindulgent, perverse, and dangerous is nothing new. It is, after all, as clear how Edgar Allan Poe felt about Prince Prospero and his revelers as it is how Mike Flanagan feels about Prospero Usher and his. But in the main, television’s swipes at the ultrarich have been satirical and visually straightforward, and have preferred to keep violence to a sanitized minimum. Succession is a very nice-looking show, as is The White Lotus (2021– ), but they don’t feel as though the depravity of the characters has seeped through into the stuff of the filmmaking itself.

The New Lurid, by contrast, gives television auteurs and viewers alike a new narrative and visual vocabulary, one commensurate with the degeneracy of our overlords as represented by the characters to which they often directly correspond. Like a televisual vanitas, it is sensual but death-haunted, lush to the point of rottenness, like a once-magnificent family finally, terminally, gone to seed.

I wrote about Copenhagen Cowboy, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Idol, Dead Ringers, and a genre I like to call “The New Lurid” — overheated, oversaturated, oversexed tales of depravity and violence among the entropic elite and its interlopers; think “Saltburncore” — for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

The latest episode of the Boiled Leather Audio Podcast takes a look back at the year in television, as Stefan and I review my picks for the ten best shows of 2023. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts!

9. The Idol (HBO/Max)

Fuck what you heard. The Idol, 2023’s most hated show, is far and away the TV I’ve thought, and argued, about the most this year. Hype and backlash cycles notwithstanding, Sam Levinson and Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye created a sleazy, lurid, funny, fucked-up, incredibly straightforward satire of the starlet factory à la Paul Verhoeven. Unlike, say, Succession, which spoofs the ultra-wealthy without simultaneously trying to feel like Dallas or Empire, The Idol sends up the sex-and-drugs world of pop star Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp in the year’s most underappreciated performance) and her grifter svengali Tedros Tedros (Tesfaye in the year’s second most underappreciated performance) while also embodying it. 

The two leads act out their intense and at times humiliating material without a net, but they’re buoyed by a Greek chorus of comedic performances by the likes of Hank Azaria, Rachel Sennott, Eli Roth, Jane Adams, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph (who turns on a dime to deliver genuinely affecting material whenever called for). All of these terrific actors perform in front of a backdrop of lush retro synths and strings courtesy of Tesfaye, Levinson, and composer and super-producer Mike Dean, appearing as himself. In a sane world this would have just been Pop Starship Troopers — gnarly, nasty, sexy, fun, appreciated by those who get it and basically ignored by everyone else. It couldn’t sustain the discourse around it, and shouldn’t have had to, when its meaning was so plain to see, and enjoy

I wrote about the ten best television shows of 2023 for Decider. I’m enormously proud of this list. The variety I’ve seen across TV critics’ best-of lists this year can be nothing but good for both TV and criticism, and I’m glad to have contributed in my own way. Anyway, I believe in all these shows and think they’re worth your time.

At any rate, presented with a starring vehicle he himself helped build, Tesfaye proceeded to get in that vehicle, aim at the wall, and plow into it at full speed throughout the course of The Idol’s five episodes. I’m not talking about the strength of his performance, which I’ll get to, or the critical and commercial reception of the show, which is irrelevant. I’m talking about the deliberate damage he did to his image as a suave, sophisticated, ice-cold Hollywood vampire. The goofy name, the rat-tail hairdo, the rehearsed pickup lines, the corny daddy-dom sexual antics, the on-screen comparisons to parasitical showbiz-adjacent cults run by weirdly charismatic grifters like the Manson Family and NXIVM, the backstory of decidedly unglamorous pimping and abuse, loudly jacking off in the dressing room of an upscale clothing boutique, getting hammered and trying kung fu to intimidate his inamorata Jocelyn’s (Lily Rose Depp) ex-boyfriend, obnoxiously heckling Joss after she rejects him and plans her next career move without him, visibly struggling not to puke after a multi-day bender as industry bigwig Nikki (Jane Adams) tells him what a genius he is — Tedros, the character Tesfaye created with showrunner-writer-director Sam Levinson and co-creator Reza Fahim, is a stake driven through that Hollywood vampire’s heart, over and over again.

I wrote about Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye’s performance in The Idol for Decider.

Anyway, does any of this resemble how the music industry works? I don’t have a clue, and I don’t really care. For one thing, I don’t think any of that matters much for visual fantasias about pop stardom. Velvet Goldmine changed my life and I don’t think it was a realistic look at how David Bowie’s management screwed him contractually. For another, realism in this kind of satirical erotic-thriller thing is beside the point: I don’t go to Body Double for a look at the adult film industry of the early ‘80s, which I’m reasonably sure involved fewer Frankie Goes to Hollywood performances IRL. I don’t think Basic Instinct is an accurate portrayal of homicide detectives or novelists, and I wouldn’t want it to be. Once it became clear what The Idol was doing — and that what it was doing was good shit, in the vein of much good shit from days of yore — all I wanted, and what I got, was for it to keep doing it, and doing it, and doing it well, as the song goes. It hit an unpleasant note there at the end, but that’s by design. If it were any more pleasant, they’d have been doing it wrong.

I reviewed the finale of The Idol for Decider. I am not in the prognostication business but I’ve read enough recently from sharp writers to lead me to suspect the tide will shift in favor of this very good show.

When it comes to The Idol, I think Jabba the Hutt put it best: “This bounty hunter is my kind of scum, fearless and inventive.” It’s smart about its sordidness in a way that leaves me thoroughly entertained. As it shifts from one tone to another, from sledgehammer-obvious satire to genuinely unpleasant psychological horror (nobody says torture porn on my watch) to Skinemax-style erotica, there’s one constant: It’s a nasty bit of business (complimentary). 

[…]

The Idol (which I’ll note for the record is airing during the WGA strike, which the studios could end at any time by paying and treating their writers fairly) has its fairly obvious film antecedents, Basic Instinct and Showgirls and The Neon Demon and Body Double and so forth. But while the vituperative reaction to the show may mask it, it’s not alone in TV land either. Nicholas Winding Refn’s Copenhagen Cowboy and Too Old to Die Young, Nick Antosca and Lenore Zion’s Brand New Cherry Flavor, and even some elements of Paolo Sorrentino’s The Young Pope and The New Pope, not to mention Levinson’s own Euphoria, point in the direction of this visually lurid, tonally fluid exploration of exploitation and glamour. It’s like biting on sexy tinfoil. I’m all for it.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of The Idol for Decider.

But why is material that’s this much of a live wire present in the grunting-as-he-jerks-off, “cartay blanchay” show? You’ve gotta return to your Basic Instinct and your Body Double for the answer to that. The Idol is a sort of satire you don’t really see much that often, not even on a network as satire-heavy as HBO: the kind of satire that effectively imitates, and thus also functions as, that which it’s satirizing.What do you think? Be the first to comment.

Succession played with the allure of extreme wealth as both a selling point and a plot point, but it’s not like it felt like Dynasty or Dallas at any point; it was satirizing these kinds of people, not those kinds of shows. Same with The White Lotus or The Righteous Gemstones. 

The Idol, by contrast? Well, you know how RoboCop and Starship Troopers lampoon action movies but are also incredibly kickass action movies? For that matter, you know how Twin Peaks’s initial run was both a weird parody of nighttime soaps while also being the best nighttime soap on television? The Idol is doing fucked-up sex shit even as it pastiches fucked-up sex shit. To put it in terms from the show itself, it’s Chaim saying “I fucking love that guy” one minute, and “I think our girl’s in trouble” the next.

I reviewed this weekend’s episode of The Idol for Decider.

To that point, this episode has very little time for the “The Idol is a glorification of abusers” viewpoint, because much as he was in the pilot (remember that gross coke loogie he hocks?), Tedros is depicted as a tacky and obvious grifter creep at every opportunity — the exception, of course, being when he’s pouring on the charm-and-dom routine for Jocelyn in the flesh. But behind the scenes, he’s talking about her like a business investment for his club — the exact same way he talks about Dyanne (Jennie Kim), the talented backup dancer he seems to have steered into Jocelyn’s orbit specifically to replace her. Writer-director Sam Levinson literally has Tedros do the “no, I’m alone” bit over the phone to Joss when in fact he’s surrounded by people and getting his hair braided that very moment. For god’s sake, his name is Tedros Tedros! Tedros is a ridiculous dick! It isn’t subtle!

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Idol for Decider.

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.