The Idol Finale Got Review-Bombed Before Even Airing
The unflattering score has cemented the series' unpopularity with the audience.
When The Weeknd announced back in 2021 that he was going to produce a series for HBO, his fans were psyched. After all, the four-time Grammy award winner was (and still is) one of his generation's most popular pop singers.
However, when The Idol premiered a month ago, it divided opinions sharply from the start.
Revolving around Jocelyn, an aspiring pop performer portrayed by Lily-Rose Depp, the series depicts the vices of the entertainment industry in a rather scandalous fashion. In addition, it is explicitly sexual, which many viewers have found revolting rather than appealing. Consequently, The Idol has not performed as well as anticipated with audiences to such an extent that the fifth and final episode started getting bad reviews even before it aired.
Episode 5 hasn’t even aired yet and it’s getting mass hate reviews right now lmaooo wth
by u/rickkydalton in theidol
Many viewers gave it extremely low scores without even seeing it. When the episode was released on 2 July, it already had an IMDb rating of just 3.7, marking a new low for The Idol, whose scores on all major review aggregators have been on an uninterrupted downward trajectory ever since the first episode came out.
Now that the episode is out and people have seen it, its score has gone up a little bit to 4.1, but still, the consensus among most viewers is that the show's finale is a disaster, whose only saving grace is that it's in perfect alignment with the rest of the series.
'I agree with the notion that people shouldn’t just hate something without watching it…however with that said…I have seen every episode and the show is legitimately really, really bad…the pacing is abysmal, the writing is bad, the acting isn’t great, the tone is off as if the show doesn’t know what it wants to be…' a Redditor commented.
What's interesting is that The Idol has really divided viewers in an unapologetically binary manner by creating two camps: the haters who've been trashing it since its release and die-hard fans who've been giving each episode a score of 10 out of 10, seemingly regardless of its merits or drawbacks. Overall, though, the haters’ camp has ultimately prevailed, making The Idol Max's biggest flop of the year so far.
Well, The Idol is over and done with now and can be streamed on Max in its entirety, so your mission, should you choose to accept it, could be to watch it as a five-hour movie and decide for yourself how bad or good it is.