The Idol, depending on who you’re listening to, is either a story of female empowerment or blatant misogyny. These mixed reactions extend to critics’ reviews, which seem to either love it or not love it at all (it’s mostly the latter). Despite all this, people turned out in big numbers to watch one of the most-hyped shows in a long time.
On Sunday night, the show pulled in about 913,000 viewers through streaming service Max and HBO broadcasts, per Deadline. These numbers are expected to grow as the show moves forward, as HBO said a new episode will account for between 10 and 20% of total viewership.
If that trends correctly, then the show should pull in about seven million viewers for its first episode. While encouraging, the numbers are not quite as impressive as those for Euphoria, the previous series by showrunner Sam Levinson. That show pulled in 1.1 million on its first night. About 6.6 million people watched the series on average every episode.
The Idol centers around Lily-Rose Depp as a pop singer and Abel Tesfaye (you probably know him better as The Weeknd) as a sort of nightclub owner/svengali/cult figure. The two fall into a passionate relationship that threatens to derail all the work she’s done in her career so far.
The show has a 25% Fresh critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but an audience score hovering around 63%. The Chicago Sun Times skewered the show with this headline: “So much cringe in ‘The Idol,’ from the dumb dialogue to The Weeknd’s bad acting.” That’s not good at all.
However, critics don’t really decide if a show is a hit or not, and with both Ted Lasso and Succession over, HBO needs it to work. Time will tell if it does or not.
