There’s an old saying claiming there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but that remains to be seen in the case of The Idol, with HBO’s incoming series riding nothing but a wave of negative buzz ever since it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.
Sure, the episodic tale of debauchery did get a standing ovation, but plenty of terrible projects have suffered from the same treatment. Conversely, a smattering of all-time classics have ended up being booed out of the building, so it doesn’t really matter in the slightest how long people were standing and clapping for.
There’s already a growing sentiment sweeping social media urging users not to hate-watch The Idol, and based on its current Rotten Tomatoes numbers, that seems to be about the only way it’ll draw in an audience. Having debuted to a terrible 20 percent score, the numbers have continued dropping overnight, to the extent Sam Levinson’s latest is now a certified record-breaker for all the wrong reasons.
The Idol currently boasts an embarrassing nine percent approval rating on the aggregation site, which at the time of writing, officially makes it the lowest-rated HBO original show there’s ever been. Its creator may have seized the zeitgeist and created a monster with Euphoria, but it would be an understatement of epic proportions to say that his latest small screen venture isn’t going to come into the same stratosphere.
You never know, though, audiences might be encouraged to watch it anyway just to see if The Idol truly is as irredeemable as everyone has been making it out to be, which is only going to embolden Levinson even further to campaign for a second season.