This is The Pitchwork Review. I am Pooja Patel, the editor-in-chief.

Today we'll be trying to wrap our heads around the much-talked-about, somewhat controversial HBO series, The Idol.

The show stars Lily Rose Depp as Jocelyn, a pop star trapped in the sleazy, unforgiving web of the music industry.

It also stars The Weekend as

Tadros, an abusive cult leader who takes advantage of Jocelyn and her fragile mental state. There's a lot

to unpack here, to say the least. There have been scandals around the show and a batch of reviews

that dub it as torture porn, skin crawling, and the worst show of the year. There's also been a

patch of new music from the cast alongside it. To get into all of this, I'm joined by Ryan

Domble and Jeremy Larson. Hello, friends. Hello. Hey. How's it going? I'm excited to get into

this show because I find it fascinatingly bad. Yeah, it seems like one of those shows that

may be more fun to talk about than watch. 100%. Totally.

100%.

I feel like we are generally fans of the weekend.

We will definitely sit with anticipation for anything coming from the weekend.

And so we were all curious about this show at the very least.

Then we started seeing trailers. Then we started

hearing early reviews and we were like, oh, no. I mean, the tagline for the show was that

it was the sleesiest love story in Hollywood. Is that correct? Yeah, it's about right. Yeah. I think

that was like the original tagline and then like they tried to undo that a little bit.

Uh-huh.

Well, Jeremy, why don't you just set the show up for us for people who haven't watched it yet?

So there's actually two versions of this show.

...