“Skin-crawling … nasty, brutish … and way, way worse than you’d have anticipated” (Rolling Stone). “It feels like being licked all over by some dirty, drunk club DJ growling: ‘Nice ass’” (The Times, UK). “Kinky yet empty, like a visit to a red-light district during the pandemic” (People magazine). The Weeknd unzips his trousers “with all the energy and sexual enticement of Gollum scurrying for a fish” (GQ).
That journalists – journalists, of all the joyless, sexless people on God’s green earth – would watch The Idol and think “I’ve done hot yoga sexier than this” was surely the death knell for Sam Levinson’s skeazy HBO drama about the skeazy music biz, which starred Lily-Rose Depp as a dead-eyed pop star and Abel “the Weeknd” Tesfaye as a coked-up cult leader who joylessly make whoopee for a few hours of telly.
