It’s a sign of the times that one of the buzziest and biggest premieres at this year’s Cannes Film Festival is a TV show. Granted, Sam Levinson’s The Idol (on HBO June 4) is more cinematic than your standard small-screen fare. Levinson, who rose to TV auteur fame with HBO’s Euphoria, is a high stylist, as (if not more) concerned with vibes as he is with story. He’s also a leerer, steadfastly dedicated to showing young actresses in various states of arousal or despair.

His subject this time is Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp), a mega pop star in an uncertain career era. Her mother died a year before the show’s action, sending her into a tailspin that she’s only just recently climbed out of. A new single and a world tour are in the offing, but Jocelyn is not sure she’s headed in the right direction. A highly sexual photo taken by a past lover has leaked online, complicating her image overhaul campaign, much to the consternation of her management team (played, among others, by Hank Azaria, Troye Sivan, and a blistering Jane Adams.)

Unmoored without her mother, Jocelyn is a prime target for some kind of calculating Svengali, which is exactly who Abel Tesfaye’s shifty nightclub owner, Tedros Tedros, seems to be—based on the two episodes screened on Monday night, anyway. Tedros’s ultimate aims remain unclear, but one short term goal is quite obviously seduction. A solid portion of the first two episodes involves Jocelyn and Tedros beginning a mildly BDSM affair, something of the 50 Shades variety shot through with nighttime Los Angeles gleam. Ahead of its premiere, The Idol was whispered about as a very risqué show. It is certainly trying hard to shock and titillate us. But there’s something oddly prosaic about what I’ve seen so far. There’s a slight awkwardness, too, as if Levinson and his actors are talking dirty for the very first time. 

Depp commits to all the lustiness, but she’s far more interesting when the show is focused on Jocelyn’s career. Those scenes, staged with Altmanesque crosstalk ramble, are engaging and occasionally witty, an ensemble of fine actors deftly synthesizing the behind-the-scenes strategizing that keeps any A-lister afloat. Here the series is more straightforward—certainly more so than the looky loos and gawkers are hoping for from an already scandal-plagued curiosity—but it’s a compelling show-business drama, anchored by Depp’s thoughtful depiction of an isolated icon. I don’t quite buy Jocelyn as a 2023 pop star—her sexy shtick feels a bit dated, and we don’t really know anything about her specific artistry—but it’s still engaging watching her struggle her way through a comeback. 

I’m also intrigued by the mystery surrounding Tedros, who near immediately raises the suspicions of Azaria’s character, Jocelyn’s best friend/assistant (Rachel Sennott), and a handler played with pepper by Da’Vine Joy Randolph. It’s no wonder: he’s got a creepy demeanor, arriving at Jocelyn’s sprawling mansion for the first time cloaked in darkness like Count Dracula himself. And what are we to make of an ominous scene in which Tedros seems to be ritually debasing one of his acolytes using some kind of shock collar? Perhaps there’s a cult surrounding Tedros, with Jocelyn his most high-profile recruit.

Mystery and workplace drama are pretty familiar television formats. It’s surprising how standard, how predicated on formula, The Idol actually is after all the hubbub surrounding the departure of the original director, Amy Seimetz, and the reworking of the show, which sources told Rolling Stone threatened to turn it into sexist “torture porn.” It’s telling—deliberately, I’m sure—that in one scene we see Jocelyn watching Basic Instinct, one of the crowning jewels of the erotic thriller boom of the last century. Maybe that’s all we’re really being served: a tawdry tale of sex gone scary, dressed up in the visual vernacular of TV’s wunderkind du jour. Though, the show seems to take itself pretty seriously. When Tedros and Jocelyn begin their flirtation, the music crescendos into a threatening drone, seeming to announce the arrival of something earthshaking, a tremendous shift in the natural order of things. But by the end of episode two, the stakes don’t seem all that high, at least in contrast to all the aesthetic sound and fury swirling around our troubled hero. 

I suppose that could be the fun of The Idol, its pretensions existing in amusing dialogue with the basic seaminess of its story. Levinson’s whole deal is not for everyone—and often not for me—but The Idol offers up enough regular old entertainment to balance out his aggressive flourish and the bluster of his thematic ambitions. Just don’t approach the first two episodes with any notion that you are about to see something startling and transgressive. Maybe that stuff is coming in later episodes, but thus far, The Idol is way too Top 40 to rattle the squares.