This year’s biggest TV disaster

But as the first two episodes were screened at Cannes Film Festival in May – again giving the false impression that this was a drama that was the height of prestige – the reviews came in thick and fast, and they weren’t complimentary. The i newspaper called it “one of the most unapologetically chauvinistic, superficially glossy, try-hard-provocative pieces of media in recent memory”, while ABC News dubbed it an “outdated, outmoded slice of failed titillation”. When the show then premiered on HBO in the US (and Sky Atlantic in the UK) a couple of weeks later, viewers’ reactions on Twitter echoed these initial reviews. Matters weren’t helped by The Idol taking the same time slot on HBO as the critically and publicly lauded Succession, with one Twitter user – among many – asking: “How can we go from the greatest TV shows of all time and then to the worst in the span of a week?”

The start of its problems

So what went wrong? The first indication of trouble came in April 2022, when Variety reported that director Amy Seimetz had left the project, with co-creator and exec producer Levinson mooted to replace her. It was reported also that Tesfaye was unhappy with the creative direction of the show, and felt it was leaning too much into a “female perspective”.

Then in March 2023 came the Rolling Stone exposé revealing that, according to sources on set, the rewrites had caused the production to become “like sexual torture porn”. One crew member said: “It was like any rape fantasy that any toxic man would have in the show – and then the woman comes back for more because it makes her music better.” Rather than addressing the criticisms, Tesfaye hit back at the feature on Twitter with a clip of himself as Tedros in the series, saying about Rolling Stone: “aren’t they… a little irrelevant?”.

When the show then aired, however, the views of those production insiders were mirrored by the critics. The main issue that many had was with the series’ pornographic, hyper-male gaze. From the excruciatingly clichéd sex scenes (with one dubbed “The worst sex scene in history” by British GQ) in which Jocelyn was repeatedly shown to be degraded by Tedros, to her own masochistic masturbation scenes, Jocelyn appeared to have been created as a disturbing fantasy figure of female submission.

Last night’s finale only served to enforce this: the character didn’t seem to exist outside of being sexy, or having sex; her great musical awakening amounted to an average song about being choked by her “daddy”, which she writhed around performing for music executives. And even though she finally called out her abuser Tedros and cut him out of her life, she then relented, and reunited with him on stage, calling him “the love of my life”.

Some compared The Idol to the 2022 Netflix film Blonde, another production that seemed to revel in the relentless sexual violation of its female lead character (in that case, Marilyn Monroe, played by Ana De Armas), shot for the male gaze, by a male director, Andrew Dominik.

An identity crisis

Then there was the confusion over what exactly The Idol was meant to be. It seemed to be many shows masquerading as one: was it an erotic drama, exploring power dynamics in an S&M relationship? Was it a satire on the absurd nature of the music industry? Were we meant to fear Tedros, asked Vulture, or laugh at him? The show awkwardly flip-flopped about, never fully landing on what it wanted to deliver. Meanwhile, the seeming focus on being edgy – or “sick and twisted”, as early teaser trailers claimed the minds of Levinson and Tesfaye to be – came at a cost. The dialogue was appalling, the plot didn’t get moving until the penultimate episode – and even then was a confusing mess – and there was little to no character progression. Forget hard-core; “this is hard-bore,” quipped the Evening Standard.

Any positives were lost in the chaotic discourse around the show. But the actors, for the most part, did their best with a bad script – Depp’s performance cements her as a talent on the rise and other standouts from the series were Sivan, Da’Vine Joy Randolph and Susanna Son. While Tesfaye was panned for the conceiving of the idea and his lack of acting skills, his soundtrack was at least full of The Weeknd’s signature beguiling, dark electronic pop, conveying the themes of his TV show far more convincingly than the series itself. The track World Class Sinner / I’m A Freak, while presumed to be in part a parody of sexualised tracks young female singers are made to perform, has been heralded as a “banger”, leading GQ to ask “Is this the song of the summer?” (apologies to Kylie Minogue’s Padam Padam) after being streamed more than 11m times on Spotify since its release.

Are there any lessons to be learned from this blighted TV series? While an obvious one seems to be about allowing female directors to lead on traumatic, female-focused stories, another one might be that no superstar creative is too big to fail. Tesfaye’s desire to make the show fit his vision seems to have won out, for better, or in this case, most likely worse.

“From what I’ve seen, the show is great,” Tesfaye told W Magazine in May before the show’s premiere. “Everything is a risk: When you’ve done the best you can, I would call that a happy ending. And I got my voice back.” But at what cost to something that had the makings of an interesting production?

If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.