HBO’s five-episode drama premiered on June 4, 2023, and finished on July 2. By August it was canceled. The Idol arrived with one of the loudest marketing pushes of the year and lasted four weeks on air.
The Idol was created by Sam Levinson, Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye, and Reza Fahim. It stars Lily-Rose Depp as Jocelyn, a pop idol trying to reclaim her title as the sexiest pop star in the United States after a nervous breakdown derailed her last tour. Tesfaye plays Tedros, a nightclub impresario, self-help guru, and cult leader with a sordid past. Their relationship is the engine of the whole thing.
It does not run.
Trailer, via HBO.
Jocelyn, Tedros, and a Story That Never Starts
The premise is thin, and the show seems to know it. Jocelyn wants her status back. Tedros wants her. The series wants us to wonder whether her romantic awakening will take her to glorious new heights or the deepest and darkest depths of her soul. That is the synopsis, and it is also the entire arc. Five episodes is not enough time to build a cult, a career comeback, and a psychological unravelling, and The Idol does not try to earn any of them. It asserts them.
Depp is asked to carry the show. She does what she can. The problem is that Jocelyn is written as a wound, not a person — every scene asks her to be acted upon rather than to act. Tesfaye, by contrast, is given the run of the place. Tedros is meant to be magnetic and sinister at once. To this viewer he is neither. He is a man in a robe saying unpleasant things, and the show plays his unpleasantness as though it were depth.
The supporting cast is genuinely stacked, which makes the waste worse. Suzanna Son as Chloe, Troye Sivan as Xander, Jane Adams as Nikki, Hank Azaria as Chaim, Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Destiny, Moses Sumney as Izaak, Hari Nef as Talia, Rachel Sennott as Leia, Ramsey as Ramsey, Mitch Modes as Mitch. These are good performers. Almost none of them get a storyline. They orbit.
What the Overhaul Did to the Show
The Idol did not arrive as it was conceived. Levinson took over directing duties from original director Amy Seimetz and reshaped the series around a new vision. The shift moved the story away from its initial line and toward a “degrading” love story with heavier sexual content. Production paused and resumed several times. Scenes were filmed during Tesfaye’s tour. The series was shot using improvisation and included scenes filmed at Tesfaye’s mansion.
You can feel all of that on screen, and not in a good way. Improvisation can produce looseness and life. Here it produces scenes that wander, repeat, and stop without landing. The reshaped vision is legible in every episode: the show is far more interested in provocation than in Jocelyn. When a production is rebuilt around a new creative direction — in this case, a “degrading” love story with heavier sexual content — that direction tends to crowd out everything else. It does.
The casting churn tells the same story. The initial announcement had Tesfaye starring. On September 29, 2021, Lily-Rose Depp signed on as the female lead opposite him. On November 22, Suzanna Son, Steve Zissis, and Troye Sivan joined the main cast, with Melanie Liburd, Tunde Adebimpe, Elizabeth Berkley, Nico Hiraga, and Anne Heche announced as recurring. On December 2, Juliebeth Gonzalez joined as a series regular, with Maya Eshet, Tyson Ritter, Kate Lyn Sheil, Liz Caribel Sierra, and Finley Rose Slater in recurring roles.
Then came the overhaul. On April 25, 2022, Variety reported the show would undergo “drastic” changes in cast and creative direction. On April 27, Deadline Hollywood reported that Son, Zissis, and Gonzalez were not expected to return. In July, Rachel Sennott, Hari Nef, and Jennie Ruby Jane joined. On August 21, a second teaser confirmed Moses Sumney, Jane Adams, Dan Levy, Eli Roth, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Mike Dean, Ramsey, and Hank Azaria. On March 1, 2023, Rolling Stone reported that Son and Sivan had stayed on despite the overhaul. Heche, in what would have been her final television role, and Berkley were no longer in the cast as HBO took the series in “a new creative direction.”
That is not a normal production history. It is a rebuild, and rebuilds leave scars.
The Cannes Premiere and the Five-Week Run
The first two episodes premiered at the 76th Cannes Film Festival in May 2023. Cannes is a launchpad for filmmakers with something to prove, not a venue for a five-episode HBO drama with a troubled shoot. The festival screening gave the show a month of prestige ahead of its HBO debut.
Here is the schedule as it actually ran.
| Episode | Air date | Network |
|---|---|---|
| Premiere (two episodes screened) | May 2023, 76th Cannes Film Festival | Festival |
| Season 1 begins | June 4, 2023 | HBO and Max |
| Season 1 ends | July 2, 2023 | HBO and Max |
| Cancellation | August 2023 | HBO |
Five episodes. Four weeks on air. One season. The whole thing was over before most of the audience had decided whether to keep watching. In this paper’s reading, that is the shape of a failure, and it is worth being precise about why.
Where the Show Actually Fails
It fails at the level of character. Jocelyn’s breakdown is backstory. Her ambition is stated, not dramatized. Tedros is a cult leader whose cult we never see operate at scale. The show tells us he is dangerous and then shows us a man being rude in a house. The relationship between them is supposed to be the whole point, and it never generates the tension the premise requires. As this paper reads it, the show is never clear about what Jocelyn wants from him beyond the fact that she wants something.
It fails at the level of structure. Five episodes is a short order for a story with this much to establish. There is no room for a midpoint turn, no room for a supporting character to take a real swing, no room for the audience to settle in before the ending arrives. The finale has to do the work of a season, and it cannot.
And it fails at the level of taste. The heavier sexual content that the overhaul introduced is not the problem in itself. The problem, as this paper sees it, is that the show presents it as the point rather than as a tool. Provocation without character is just noise, and The Idol is loud.
The published critical score is 4.4 out of 10 on IMDb. That is a fair number. It is not a zero — the cast is real, the production values are real, and there are individual scenes where Depp and Adams and Randolph remind you what the show could have been. But a show is not its best ten minutes.
What the Cast Could Not Fix
Start with Depp. She is in almost every scene and she is given almost nothing to play. Jocelyn’s nervous breakdown happened before the show begins, so the audience never sees the woman who fell apart — only the woman cleaning up. That is a harder role, and the writing does not help her find it. Her ambition is announced in dialogue rather than shown in behavior. When she says she wants to be the greatest and sexiest pop star in America, we believe the sentence and not the person.
Tesfaye has the opposite problem. He has too much to play and no character to hang it on. Tedros is a nightclub owner, a self-help guru, and a cult leader, three jobs that should produce three different kinds of menace. The show gives him one register: smug. A cult leader needs followers, and The Idol never shows us the machinery of the cult. It shows us a man with a house.
Adams, Randolph, and Sennott are the ones who come closest to escaping. Nikki, Destiny, and Leia are written as foils, but the performers find small pockets of real behavior in them. Those pockets are the only places the show breathes.
What The Idol Leaves Behind
The Idol matters less as a television series than as a case study. It is what happens when a production is rebuilt mid-flight around a creative pivot, when a festival premiere is used to front-load prestige, and when a five-episode order is asked to carry a story that needed either half the scope or twice the runway. HBO took the series in a new creative direction, and the new direction did not work.
The cancellation in August 2023 was not a surprise. The show was widely panned on release, and it had no unresolved hook that a second season was waiting to pay off. A renewal would have meant starting over from a position the show had already spent five episodes failing to hold.
What is worth watching here is the production history, not the product. The Idol is a document of a specific kind of decision-making — the pivot, the reshoot, the festival, the marketing — and it is more interesting as that than as drama. Levinson, Tesfaye, and Fahim set out to make something transgressive and ended up making something inert. That is the real story, and it is a more useful one than the show itself.
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