The Idol
If there was any question that the David Zaslav era of WB/Discovery/HBO/Max is on shaky ground, it might be the fact that The Idol was approved to be released under the prestigious HBO banner.
The sex and misogyny-drenched show starring Lily-Rose Depp and The Weeknd was trash by critics, audiences, everyone, with some of its worst moments turned into memes. It was so bad there’s some measure of theorizing that the show actually pulled its last episode to end at five instead, just so it would be over faster.
In fact, if you want to visualize just how bad The Idol is, you can look at the grand total of every HBO and HBO Max series ever released. Out of 106 shows tallied, The Idol is ranked…106th, and by a good margin at that. Here’s the bottom 10, in reverse order:
- The Idol – 19%
- The Time Traveler’s Wife – 38%
- The Nevers – 49%
- Coastal Elites – 57%
- Arli$$ – 62%
- Little Britain USA – 64%
- Entourage – 65%
- The Vow – 68%
- True Blood – 68%
- Sex and the City – 70%
That should give you some measure of HBO’s overall quality by itself, the fact that only five shows in its history are rated “rotten” out of 106 total, and by the end of the list we get into shows that are still considered classics of the service. Arli$$ was already regarded as universally pretty bad. I actually liked The Nevers and was sad it didn’t get picked up again. I don’t know much about the formerly worst series before this, The Time Traveler’s Wife, only that it starred Rose Leslie from Game of Thrones. I guess it went poorly.
The Idol
But The Idol is on another plane of existence, 19% lower than other lowest show here and 38% below even the fourth-worst HBO series of all time. But it’s not just critics. The Time Traveler’s Wife and The Nevers actually have decently high, 80%+ audience scores. The Idol has a 41%. Everyone hated this show.
It feels like Sam Levinson from Euphoria was given free reign to do whatever he wanted with The Weeknd, and unlike Euphoria, the result was catastrophic. This is deeply embarrassing for The Weeknd on every level, from the conception of this project to his role and acting within it. I’ve never seen someone have so much control over something that makes them look so, so bad. It’s a rarified degree of self-unawareness.
This show should have never seen the light of day and HBO/Max/Zaslav/whoever needs to figure out exactly what happened here and how it can never happen again. They already took the HBO out of the Max name, but if they take the quality out of HBO, it’s game over.
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