[imagesource:hbo]

It’s hard to believe that HBO’s catastrophic series The Idol was promising at one point.

We should have known it would be a disaster, as even before the series was aired for the world to see, it was called out for being terribly controversial.

Horrible headlines have been surfacing since, revealing how the original director, Amy Seimetz, left the show after Euphoria‘s Sam Levinson started taking over. He was accused of turning the script into a sex-crazed misogyny-ravaged shitshow rather than a subtle commentary on exploitation in the entertainment industry.

“It went from satire to the thing it was satirising,” one crew member complained, as Lily-Rose Depp, the star of HBO show, revealed that she would often have to “steer clear” of her fellow actor, Abel Tesfaye, AKA The Weeknd when he was “in the zone”.

The show is hinged on a controversial relationship between their characters, with Abel as the sleazy club/cult owner Tedros who ultimately controls Lily-Rose’s Jocelyn through sex and manipulation.

Kicking off with a behind-the-scenes scandal was the least of it, as The Idol continued to receive disastrous reviews and online hate, particularly around Levinson’s disturbing penchant for depicting sexual violence, per BuzzFeed News:

Earlier this year, in March, crew members alleged in a report published by Rolling Stone that Sam’s scripts had added extremely disturbing sexual and physically violent scenes between Jocelyn and Tedros’s characters. One source described The Idol as “sexual torture porn,” while someone else alleged that it was “like any rape fantasy that any toxic man would have in the show.”

The insiders also claimed that The Idol had initially featured scenes so disturbing and graphic that they had to be cut, including one that allegedly featured Jocelyn asking Tedros to beat her, which gave Tedros an erection.

Appropriately labelled as “unnecessarily disturbing” to watch due to its graphic and degrading content, The Idol currently has an incredibly low score of 22% on Rotten Tomatoes.

My God, this man is sick. Sam Levinson is a sickman. https://t.co/NY5E5UAhKa

— MadMax (@IronGiante) July 2, 2023

Despite all this, The Weeknd and Lily-Rose have defended the show on countless occasions, but again, social media users have been left disturbed after news about another alleged scene that was apparently cut from the series surfaced:

According to Page Six, [sic] a source alleged that The Weeknd and Lily-Rose were filming a sex scene when director Sam suddenly stepped in with impromptu instructions for their characters.

Sam, who has also been criticized over the sexualized nature of his HBO show Euphoria, allegedly “explicitly directed” that Tedros “strangle” Jocelyn and ejaculate “inside her without her consent.”

It gets worse:

What’s more, the source claimed that Sam was “by the monitor, laughing and feeding lines to The Weeknd’s character like, ‘I own you,’” as he gave the instructions, and that most of the people on set found the scene “extremely disturbing.”

Another insider confirmed that the scene was “originally set up to lead to a pregnancy scare for Jocelyn” but was cut “because of storyline adjustments,” adding that it’s “a normal part of the creative process on a television series.” Ya well, laughing along with sexual abuse is not normal on any account, real or fictionalised.

Sam Levinson can only write one arc for a woman and it’s pairing her with the most despicable man to ever exist and somehow still making her the villain pic.twitter.com/Durj3XCmkh

— Bella Ramsey emmy campaign manager (@rejectedhannah) July 4, 2023

The Weeknd and Sam Levinson should never be looked at the same way again.

[source:buzzfeednews]