While many of the industry insights are surely accurate and startling, plot machinations have become tedious: a roving list of targets for the whatever is annoying the co-creators that week. It has also become increasingly hard to take Tesfaye or his co-creators ( Euphoria’s Sam Levinson and Reza Fahim) in good faith. Instead, we are left with a twist that gestures at something sinister, but too faintheartedly to make it compelling. It is impossible not to wonder whether director Amy Seimetz, kicked out during a creative overhaul, would have delivered the twist more successfully (she would have). We will likely never know the extent of The Idol’s behind-the-scenes drama, but the fluctuating number of episodes would suggest that there was a lot of last-minute editing, and an uneven pace does little to dispel that. A twist, of course, can come out of nowhere – the best ones often do! – but the show is not confident enough to pull it off. Everything in this season finale, from Jocelyn’s “fuck yous” to an unfinished storyline about her ex potentially being framed for rape, feels impossibly rushed. It is an intriguing premise, which The Idol fumbles. Like, just over there, in the corner, thank you. She takes him on stage, introduces him to the world as her love, and tells him to stand over there. He appears, tail between his legs, and realises that he has been played for a fool: Jocelyn has taken his stars for tour openers (I cannot stress how average they are) and strung him along with fake stories (that hair brush and Jocelyn’s red scarf are neat call backs). And then, just as Jocelyn is about to take to the stage, she invites Tedros backstage. We learn this with about ten minutes to go, just as everything seems to have been sorted out: the Vanity Fair journalist Talia (Hari Nef, working to enviable deadlines) has written an exposé of Tedros, Jocelyn’s tour is back on, harried assistant Leia (Rachel Sennott) has handed in her notice. The twist – and to call it a twist undermines the artistic venture we know as twists – is that Jocelyn has been controlling Tedros all along. “I see the parties and the diamonds sometimes when I close my eyes,” Rodrigo whispers, with the threat of an unfailing assassin, “six months of torture you sold as some forbidden paradise.” It was hard not to think of those lines, if you were indeed one of millions of people who streamed the single, while watching The Idol’s finale, in which Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp) finally throws off the shackles of cult leader and supposed star marker Tedros (Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye). That song, co-written by Rodrigo and frequent collaborator Dan Nigro, charts the lows and lows of falling in with a vampiric, blood-sucking tormentor. It proved strange timing for The Idol, a show about a huge, young pop star, that actual huge, young pop star Olivia Rodrigo released her new single, “Vampire”, the Friday before this weekend’s finale.
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