We hear all the time that “sex sells,” but with the new Max series The Idol, it’s fair to ask, “At what cost?”
The series, premiering June 4, stars popular entertainers Lily-Rose Depp as a troubled pop star, and the Weeknd, as a music industry executive/cult leader.
TV critics have slammed The Idol, citing it as “pornographic,” a “sordid male fantasy,” a “darker, crazier, and more risqué version” of HBO’s Euphoria, which is telling.
Euphoria, a show about high school aged characters, has depicted child rape, full-frontal male and female nudity of both adult and child characters, illicit drug use by teen characters, pornography use by teen and adult characters, and frequent expletives (714 uses of the ‘f-word’ over 8 episodes). Euphoria was touted by HBO as its “youngest-skewing drama series.”
The Parents Television and Media Council has issued a warning to parents about The Idol, given that it’s likely to appeal to young audiences and is being marketed to Euphoria viewers. The organization has also found evidence that Max is inconsistent in preventing children from accessing TV-MA-rated content.
We’ve been down this road before, where the entertainment industry creates explicit content that should only be for adults, but markets it to young viewers, including teens and children.
In November 2022, Parents Television and Media Council research revealed that Hollywood marketed teen-targeted TV shows with explicit adult content to young teens through social media sites popular with 13-17-year-olds. HBO (now Max) used TikTok and Instagram as a marketing platform for its original series. The “#euphoria” hashtag alone took users to a landing page that carried the network’s branding. On Instagram, the “Euphoria” official page had had 7.8 million followers, while 60+ users had their own “Euphoria” fan pages; and the “Euphoria” tag was used on over 3.7 million posts. On TikTok, the hashtag “euphoria” had amassed nearly 50 billion views as of August 2022.
Entertainment brands know they can do an end-run around parents by using social media to market their adult programs, so they do.
And children and teens are there. A few teen responses to an informal survey of how frequently they see Euphoria in their social media feeds on Instagram and TikTok, and by YouTube, are sobering: “The Insta explore page is flooded with Euphoria stuff.” “Every 20 videos on TikTok.” “I see memes everywhere.”
Shame on Hollywood. Euphoria normalizes destructive behaviors, which are then marketed to impressionable teens and children. Young viewers will stand to lose the most by yet another program like The Idol that will desensitize them to glamorized sexually exploitative content.
Sam Levinson, the creator of both Euphoria and The Idol, was influenced by pornography in creating The Idol, saying, “We live in a very sexualized world. The influence of pornography is really strong in terms of the psyche of young people in the States. We see this in pop music and how it reflects the underbelly of the internet. With this show, and working with Lily, we had a lot of discussions about who Jocelyn is as a person, how she’s angling, who she’s playing to, and the sexuality comes out of that character.”
Levinson may be underselling the extent to which The Idol was influenced by pornography. The Washington Post gives a glimpse of what kind of pornographic content viewers can expect:
“So, is the series torture porn-y? Yes. A lot. … Jocelyn and Tedros hook up in the stairwell of the club he runs (which doubles as his sex-cult headquarters during the day), and he starts to choke her, before a worried Leia comes looking for Jocelyn and interrupts them. Among other kinks, he wraps her robe over her face, ties the belt around her neck, nearly suffocates her, then cuts a hole in the cloth and has her sing out of it. She enthusiastically debuts her ‘new sound,’ filled with recorded tracks of her orgasming, to her team the next day. Then, as Tedros ghosts her, she must try to re-create the danger of their encounters through choking herself while masturbating in a way that leaves her inner thighs covered in gashes.”
Evie Magazine says the quiet part out loud, soberly summarizing The Idol: “…the series was created to gratify the perverted fantasies of both of its creators. As a result, the series did nothing but deliver disturbing content full of sex and violence that serves no purpose other than to shock the audience. There's a difference between highlighting the behind-the-scenes abuse that happens in the entertainment industry and romanticizing it, and it's unfortunate The Idol resorted to the latter.”
Our children and teens are constantly bombarded with toxic and harmful content on social media and in entertainment. The Idol appears to only serve more of that, and in doing so, normalizes demeaning, dehumanizing relationships and a pornographic culture. Parents beware, indeed.
Melissa Henson is the vice president of the Parents Television and Media Council, a nonpartisan education organization advocating responsible entertainment. Twitter: @ThePTC