Who’s Giving HBO’s ‘The Idol’ All of These Five-Star Ratings?

After The Idol’s much-buzzed-about premiere at Cannes in May, Sam Levinson predicted that he and co-creator Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye were about to have the “show of the summer” on their hands.

The series about the self-described “sleaziest love story” in Hollywood starring a global superstar alongside Lily-Rose Depp was expected to drum up some discussion online. But the clamor around The Idol might not have been exactly what Levinson had in mind. 

The show’s star power, sex appeal, creative team, and the big bucks HBO reportedly shelled out for the five-episode season still couldn’t save it from harsh reviews, memes of Tesfaye’s acting chops, complaints of a paper-thin plot, and critiques of Depp’s seemingly gratuitous sex scenes. After critics walked away from screening the first two episodes at Cannes, its Tomatometer rating sat at a dismal 9% on Rotten Tomatoes. 

It didn’t fare much better in the eyes of the wider public, and even those who worked on the show have panned it. 

“Shockingly boring,” one The Idol production source tells Rolling Stone after catching an episode. 

But on social media, stans may also be pitching in to help offset some negative reviews. According to a large sample of Rotten Tomatoes audience reviews for The Idol reviewed by Rolling Stone, the majority of positive reviews came from an influx of first-time reviewers in the first four days of its June 4 premiere. Out of 500 5-star reviews, only nine came from users who had previously rated another show, meaning 98 percent of the rave reviews came from users who were posting their first review on Rotten Tomatoes. (Rolling Stone did not find similar activity when compared to The Last of Us, another popular HBO show.) 

Most of the users specifically praised Tesfaye, Depp, or Blackpink’s Jennie and generally hyped up the show. “HBO’s newest gem is here,” one user gushed. “Brace yourself for an unforgettable journey of debauchery and dirty visuals that you lust for.” “Abel’s exceptional acting skills take center stage in this groundbreaking TV show that truly pushed the envelope of what is allowed,” another wrote. “Jennie is carrying this show ngl,” declared an early reviewer. “I hope she will get better projects in future.” 

But even with the 5-star spamming, The Idol is still only scoring a 41% average audience score and has flatlined at 22% with critics on the site. Rotten Tomatoes did not respond to a request for comment for this story. HBO did not immediately respond, either.

A good portion of the early discussion around The Idol stemmed from what was happening off-screen. Production sources from the show told Rolling Stone back in March that things had gone sideways once the show’s original director, Amy Seimetz, suddenly departed the project in April 2022 and Levinson stepped in. Tesfaye was a driving force of that decision, according to reports and sources with knowledge of the situation. “What I was told was at the end of the day, Abel had a vision for it and wanted to see it through,” actress Da’Vine Joy Randolph recently told Variety. “He wanted Sam to be more than just executive [producer]. He wanted him to do it – which lucked out for me, because I got to work with Sam.”

Originally, the project was billed around a slimy cult leader luring a young, vulnerable pop star into his world. But Tesfaye wanted to shift away from the cult plotline and with Seimetz out, so was the “feminist lens” the show was being centered around, according to a source with knowledge of the situation. Production sources claim Levinson scrapped Seimetz’s take and the show morphed into “torture porn” and a “toxic male’s version of a rape fantasy,” as Rolling Stone reported in March. 

Sources tell Rolling Stone that The Idol originally put a heavier focus on Tedros’ mysterious cult. During the course of the season, Depp’s character Jocelyn was dragged deeper and deeper inside — including an unsettling induction ceremony in front of other cult members. But that psychological-thriller aspect of Seimetz’s vision was deemphasized in Levinson’s version of The Idol and has gone from “satire to the thing it was satirizing,” a source previously explained. 

Their concerns were confirmed after HBO premiered the controversial show in early June. Production sources who ended up tuning in to see how things shaped up were not impressed. 

“It was worse than I thought it’d be,” a production member tells Rolling Stone after watching the premiere. “I think the hardest part in watching was remembering how nuanced and natural the original characters — particularly Tedros, whose asexual reverence as a cult leader reawakened Jocelyn’s love of music, giving her a taste of what her voice used to be outside of her sex appeal. And this was all in the first episode. Now it’s like watching a jumbled analog of the show’s own SNL parody.”

Another source described it as “disjointed” and too fixated on the shock value and “raunchy aspects” instead of creating a show that keeps the audience engaged. “[It was] on par of what I was expecting,” they add. “But I was sort of anticipating that Sam would somehow pull out a miracle [like] how he has with Euphoria.”

Top Hollywood critics felt similarly. Variety’s Peter Debruge summarized: “The script seems calculated to fool audiences into thinking they’re observing how Hollywood operates, when so much of it amounts to tawdry clichés lifted from Sidney Sheldon novels and softcore porn.” 

Still, throughout the poor reviews, cringe dialogue, and countless think pieces, Tesfaye celebrated a report that claimed The Idol beat out HBO’s acclaimed The Last of Us and Netflix’s Wednesday in online engagement. Its premiere episode also surpassed Euphoria’s debut, racking up 3.6 million viewers in its first week compared to 3.3 million the teen drama — with a then-relatively unknown cast — garnered back in 2019. Did Levinson’s prediction come true? 

As co-creator and star, Tesfaye has been actively promoting the series and his Mike Dean-produced soundtrack, The Idol, Vol. 1 (Music from the HBO Original Series) with a Vanity Fair cover story, and interviews with GQ and Variety. He’s addressed people mocking Tedros’ wince-inducing seductive lines and even took a swipe at Rolling Stone’s March report.

In the weeks since, he’s been extremely active on Twitter (17.3 million followers) and Instagram (61 million followers), sharing memes of his character Tedros and behind-the-scenes photos from the set, taunting haters, and constantly sharing any Idol content from stans. Tesfaye’s tweets about The Idol receive on average more than a million views on Twitter. Even just retweets from stan and music accounts generate 440,000 views on average.  

A quick sweep of those chatting about The Idol on Twitter shows diehard fanbases of Tesfaye, Depp, and Blackpink’s Jennie pumping out content about them and the show, helping drum up even more engagement. Its penultimate episode, however, only managed to attract 133,000 viewers on its linear channel, and its viewership numbers have been on the decline with each passing episode.

In addition to some unusual Rotten Tomatoes activity, over on IMDb there are also some ratings and reviews that raise eyebrows. Out of the 31,000 10-star ratings, nearly half came from India. Out of a sampling of 25 of those 10-star reviews, one described the show as a “film” and an AI content detector flagged six reviews for having between 2-45% of human content.  

As Sunday night’s finale brings about a close to The Idol — which HBO has declined to specify if there will be a second season — Levinson and Tesfaye seemed to achieve what they set out to do: create the “show of the summer.” Just not in the way they hoped.

From Rolling Stone US.