HBO’s upcoming provocateur drama series about the twisted nature of the music industry The Idol has been attracting major debate over its content, especially in the aftermath of a Rolling Stone exposé, which called the show “torture porn.” For co-creator Sam Levinson of Euphoria fame, however, the article was apparently the best promo he could have asked for.
Following the Cannes premiere of the first two episodes of the show on Monday, the squad behind the controversial project has had a proper chance to defend their work. Sam Levinson, Abel Tesfaye, Lily-Rose Depp, and others, were all present for the Idol press conference this Tuesday, where the main subject of conversation was the episodes’ shocking sexual content and that Rolling Stone article.
“When my wife read me the article, I looked at her and I said, ‘I think we’re about to have the biggest show of the summer,’” Levinson said, according to Variety. The writer-director’s reaction is pretty on brand with what he and Tesfaye envisioned for the show. They wanted it to “piss some people off,” the singer explained during the press conference, so for it to be doing that exact thing before it had even premiered was positive.
Although he realizes The Idol is provocative, Levinson denies the allegations of a toxic set environment and last-minute unnecessarily sexual additions to the script. “It felt completely foreign to me. My only slight is they intentionally omitted anything that didn’t fit their narrative. We’ve seen a lot of that recently,” Levinson argued.
The first reactions to the screenings coming from the festival seem to confirm a lot of what Rolling Stone‘s sources claimed, though. Critics present at Cannes described the episodes they got to watch as “a Pornhub homepage odyssey,” containing “revenge porn photos of bodily fluids on Depp’s face.”
The Idol is scheduled for a June 4 premiere on HBO and Max.
