The Idol: The Lily-Rose Depp series has been cancelled. That’s why we won’t miss her

On television, as well as in the kitchen, it is known that not all donuts succeed with a hole, and that of The Idol, one of the most publicized series of recent years, supported by a multi-million dollar budget and two famous names as protagonists, is no exception. Despite the HBO brand – considered by many to be synonymous with quality regardless of content – and despite Sam Levinson’s direction and writing – it tells you something Euphoria? – the series, broadcast in Italy on Sky, has not convinced practically anyone. Neither the fans of Lily-Rose Depp and The Weeknd, nor the journalists who had turned up their noses so much at the screening of the first two episodes in Cannes that they were armored with comments and reviews until the airing date of the series. Yet the premises were all there, given that The Idol it offered the possibility of spying on the world of the star system from the inside, revealing the frailties of a very young pop star who is a bit Britney Spears and a bit Miley Cyrus and her influenceability by the entourage and all those who followed her. The Jocelyn of Lily-Rose Depp she had all the cards to play to be attractive: young, beautiful, very thin like all the protagonists of Levinson – so much so that someone speaks of her fetish for hollow bellies – and with a painful trauma like the death of her mother manager to deal with.

The Idolhowever, comes alive when Tedros enters Jocelyn’s turbulent life, a kind of holy man played by The Weeknd, in his acting debut – and it shows -, which we all thought was an alternative version of Charles Manson. The comparison is not thrown there at random, because we were really convinced that Levinson wanted reenact the drama of Charles Manson’s cult in the present daycomplete with a sacrificial victim à la Sharon Tate, the actress linked to Polanski who was murdered by the killer and his gang while she was eight months pregnant – it was 1969, and we would have had to wait fifty years before Quentin Tarantino laughed justice at that massacre in Once upon a time in… Hollywood -. Manson’s road was, however, immediately set aside to make room for a story deliberately over the topwhere the most libidinous and violent sex is shown with a certain satisfaction and where the mechanisms of psychological manipulation they are developed to the point of suffocating the story by preventing it from exploiting the few interesting points it could have developed.

The result is a highly pretentious series which, however, aborts any kind of starting point and flicker, crushed by a structure that seems to put aesthetics in first place rather than the plot. The saving grace of course is the wonderful soundtrack, the only notable score of a series that has put too much iron on the fire and which, by renouncing too many quirks, could have given something interesting. Instead nada, caput: The Idol is canceled by HBO after one season marked, among other things, already by the elimination of an episode with respect to those previously ordered. Not if we will miss it too much, even if we would like to give a caress to Lily-Rose Depp, who really gave her all, and also to The Weeknd, who for his Tedros agreed to show off a shaggy pigtail like hair of a pantegana to be credible in the role of viscidone.