The Idol is too square to be scandalous

polygon.com:

Few shows this year have been as deftly hyped as The Idol, HBO’s sleek new drama from Euphoria creator Sam Levinson and Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye. Over the last few months, the series has been discussed and promoted in the most sensational terms. Billed by HBO as a “twisted, turbulent love story,” trailers dropped with tone-setting lines like “When was the last truly fucking nasty-nasty bad pop girl?” The show premiered at the Cannes Film Festival — a statement in itself — and reports from the festival cast the show as a work of shock jock lasciviousness. The Idol, it seemed, was a scandal in the form of a prestige drama.

The reality is much more boring than that.

“Pop Tarts & Rat Tales,” The Idol’s premiere, is split in two parts: The first half reads like a one-act play about Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp), a mononymous pop star on the day of a full-blown PR crisis. This is the best The Idol has to offer. Across the show’s opening 30 minutes, viewers learn that Jocelyn is attempting to mount a comeback after a nervous breakdown led her to cancel a tour.

Over the course of an afternoon, Jocelyn does a risqué photo shoot, rehearses the choreography for her new single’s music video, and sits for an interview with Vanity Fair. Meanwhile, in the background, the gears of modern celebrity turn around her. An intimacy coordinator has a farcical argument with a manager over the nudity in the shoot. PR flack discuss how to spin Jocelyn’s image after her breakdown — “mental illness is sexy,” one opines. And finally, a full-blown publicity crisis emerges when a private, explicit photo of Jocelyn surfaces online and her team tries to figure out the best way to handle it before breaking the news to her.

The first half of “Pop Tarts &