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The Idol’s inability to muster anything beyond misanthropy is best embodied in its treatment of power. Tedros is a narcissist who makes a group of talented musicians, including Jocelyn, believe that they need him. He degrades them, employing verbal abuse and degenerate assault all in service, he claims, of their music. If Jocelyn reenacts the childhood trauma of her mother hitting her with a hairbrush, Tedros reasons, she will access the heights in her art that she feels cut off from as a micromanaged pop juggernaut. She relents and ends up creating a song that she loves. Later, Jocelyn’s co-manager Destiny (played formidably by Da’Vine Joy Randolph) admits that while Tedros’ methods are troubling, he seems to have molded several individual musicians into stars.
The penultimate scene of episode six suggests that Jocelyn’s hairbrush story was a lie, and that she was the one manipulating Tedros all along. It’s a shaky device that doesn’t hold up scrutiny, completely unearned when considering the broader context of Jocelyn and Tedros’ relationship, and fails at melting away the artifice of Tedros the musical svengali. The appeal of the view that dehumanization has value if it contributes to great art endures in The Idol even as it makes gestures at pushing against it.
The strongest hint of what The Idol could have been was not a filmed scene. The Weeknd’s cover of John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy,” first heard during the fourth episode, is the most interesting creation related to the HBO series. The lyrics of the original song must have been disturbing even in 1971: Lennon begs forgiveness for unspecified injuries against his lover, blaming his suspicions and insecurities for causing him to cross the line. The discrepancies between the subject matter, how they’re delivered in Lennon’s weepy vocal performance, and the ornate-yet-tender composition are all unsettling, a feeling that’s heightened given Lennon’s very real history with domestic abuse.
This reckoning with Lennon’s legacy casts a menacing shadow over the Weeknd’s cover, co-produced into a spacey synth-driven ballad by hip-hop megaproducer Mike Dean. A proud and complicated product of discourse surrounding gender and violence, the Weeknd’s “Jealous Guy” excavates our love of beautiful art made by bad people, reflects our reliance on hypocritical moral codes, and relishes luxuriously in the discomfort it might cause us. In three and a half short minutes, it accomplishes everything that The Idol mostly fails at in five episodes.
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Courtesy : https://www.thefader.com/2023/07/03/the-idol-series-review