#154: What's going on with TV?
Unpacking 'The Idol' & 'And Just Like That'
My current relationship with TV shows is one of ever-declining expectations: Five or so years ago, I approached picking my next watch like a treasure hunt; today, it’s truly a dumpster dive. This means I now spend a lot less time thinking about why any given series was good than I do thinking about why it sucked. It’s a different kind of fandom, for sure, but not an entirely unpleasant one. I’ve had a genuinely good time, for example, analyzing the dual failures of HBO’s recent hits, And Just Like That and The Idol. These shows make a perfect pair because they were honed by the same forces, but are bad for exactly opposite reasons. I think both serve as cursed little keys to the state of modern content.
I first learned about The Idol from the Rolling Stone’s viral exposé on its disastrous production. This was back in March, before it even had an air date. The article detailed how its filming had gone “off the rails,” plagued by “delays, reshoots, and rewrites” after a late-production directorial change from Amy Seimetz to Euphoria’s Sam Levinson. If the show initially centered a pop star grappling with her power and agency in the fame machine, now, the article suggested, it was merely “twisted torture porn.” The rumors were salacious: creator Abel Tesfaye (a.k.a. The Weeknd) objecting to Seimetz because she lent the show too much of a “female perspective”; the passing around of secret, unapproved scripts; Levinson showing up to set only to watch sex scenes. Naturally, the internet ate up every detail, by which I mean everyone pretended to be disappointed.
Now that the full season has aired—the finale was released last Sunday—it’s easy to imagine the exposé as part of a planned PR roll-out. Tesfaye and Levinson’s responses certainly didn’t suggest fear. Tesfaye tweeted, “@RollingStone did we upset you?” along with a clip from the show of him insulting the magazine, while Levinson reportedly turned to his wife upon finishing the article and said “I think we're about to have the biggest show of the summer,” which makes me want to scream into a pillow (because he’s right). The real genius is that I don’t actually think the article was planned at all; it just happened to embody a quality the show’s creators revere: shock and intrigue for its own sake. The article would be completely at home within The Idol’s plot, and would be similarly spun by the characters into marketing. “[The show] went from satire to the thing it was satirizing,” one anonymous production member told Rolling Stone. What’s more satirical than that!
For the uninitiated, The Idol follows a young, literally-naked pop star named Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp) as she plans a second album and tour in the difficult months following her mother’s death. She worries her new songs lack depth, so when she meets a creepy club owner named Tedros (Tesfaye) who suggests she makes songs like Prince, she falls in love instantly and invites him to move into her Hollywood mansion along with the talented young people he surrounds himself with. Turns out they’re a cult, and what plays out over the next few episodes is an S&M fantasy whereby Jocelyn begs Tedros to abuse her to improve her art. Meanwhile, her management team, whose faux-concern is obviously financially motivated, flits in and out of the picture. That about sums it up. If it sounds nonsensical, that’s because it is.
There’s a fatal near-sightedness to the script: It may be possible to puzzle out the characters’ motivations in any given scene, but there’s no guarantee those motives will continue into the next one, and in fact they probably won’t. This lends the show an overall incoherence. There are sharp, funny, and even poignant moments, and it’s certainly beautifully shot, but it’s so impressed with the sheer abundance of its own ideas that it fails to commit to a genuine artistic perspective. Instead, it’s pure provocation. The show wants to shock viewers with its violent imagery and moral ambiguity, but provocation without perspective is just spectacle. As NYTimes critic Lindsey Zoladz put it: “As attempted commentary about pop stardom, I find the show to be repellently smug—it really thinks it has something profound to say about celebrity and even (help us) female empowerment, but its big ideas all ring disappointingly hollow.”
“[The Idol] is a 90-minute movie that doesn’t have the bonkers ideas, imagery or attitude to justify the five-plus hours it asks us to pay.”
–Wesley Morris for The NYTimes
On the other side of the tonal train tracks, we have And Just Like That, a show whose first failure is its name. While the second season is currently dropping week by week without too much fanfare, the first season garnered almost as much attention as The Idol. Everyone was wondering how HBO could possibly reanimate the glittering albeit “problematic“ New York of Sex and the City in 2021, and they were right to wonder. The overly self-conscious reboot has been ridiculed mercilessly for trying to right the wrongs of the original series with a heavy hand—and at huge narrative costs: jammed-in “diversity” in the style of high-school science textbook covers, story lines that seem constructed solely to demonstrate the characters’ awareness of social issues. A friend recently described it to me as “Sesame Street for adults,” which made me laugh. (Of course I continue to watch.)
To describe the plot of And Just Like That would be impossible, because there are anywhere between six and 10 subplots happening at any given time. This is an almost poetic consequence of the creators trying to say too much—and please too many people—at once. A peek: Carrie’s husband has died (trauma plot), she’s navigating the world of podcasts (age plot) and pronouns (pride plot), grappling with her willingness to say vagina on air (sex plot), developing a friendship with Seema, her girlboss Indian real estate agent (new friend-of-color plot—each original cast member gets one), whose Birkin was just stolen (tough-on-crime plot?). This covers about 1% of it and leaves me with no time to introduce the other eight main characters. Whatever sense of curiosity and spirit propelled the original series is revived here only in rare glimpses. The rest is reheated Twitter discourse.
The Idol, meanwhile, wants to create that discourse. In this way, the two are symbiotic. The Idol opens a social media loop, And Just Like That closes one. Of course art has always responded to media, which in turn responds to art. It’s a storied formula. The original Sex and the City was certainly a reflection of the media of its time, too. But when Twitter is the inspiration, it starts to make more sense that the artwork feeding it (and feeding off of it) can feel overhyped and half-baked, determined to sell itself on vibes alone. We live, after all, in a vibes-based society. I think the creators of The Idol know this better than anyone. We shouldn’t mistake this shrewdness for genius.
Both The Idol and And Just Like That are fueled by internet-sourced neuroticism. Each is overly focused on audience reception as it manifests online, only with different aims: one hopes to shock, the other to appease. These goals aren’t surprising—they merely demonstrate the inevitable result of mistaking a marketing strategy for an artistic one. If The Idol is provocation without perspective, And Just Like That is perspective without provocation. The effect of both forfeitures is that neither show seems to have a soul, yet both succeed on one level: They get people talking. Some like to say this is the ultimate sign of a work’s artistic value. This is untrue, especially in the era of social media, where the bar for viral fodder is subterranean, but it’s definitely a sign of financial promise, and what’s more important than that?
The piece I couldn’t stop discussing with friends last week (in that it scared us) was The New Yorker’s “After Barbie, Mattel Is Raiding Its Entire Toybox.” Last Friday’s 15 things also included my new berry bowl, advice for artists, tales from my off-the-charts nesting energy, and more. The rec of the week was tips for kitchen organization, which is why I now have five tabs open for mixing bowls.
Podcast bits/bites
Last week on the podcast, I gave a verrry detailed answer to a reader question about my relationship with sponcon (i.e. ads, sponsorship, influencing, etc), and since this stuff expressly concerns the business model of Maybe Baby, I figured it might be a good ep to share with free subs too, so I’ve lowered the paywall. If you’re interested, you can listen here! It’s called “The morality of the influencer.”
And on the podcast this week, I invited one of my good friend’s mom’s, Dr. Janet Jaffe, on to discuss everything related to fertility. She’s a clinical psychologist who specializes in the topic, and after having a fascinating conversation about her work over lunch with her one day, I begged her to come on and tell me more. The ep drops on Tuesday! (I also have a pop culture roundup dropping the week after, where we’ll definitely be touching more on The Idol and AJLT.)
Hope you have a nice Sunday,
Haley