Sam Levinson's The Idol Is So Bad It Just Might Ruin Euphoria Season 3

There's a moment pretty early on in the series premiere of "The Idol" that suggests the ways in which the show is going to be problematic. As troubled pop star Jocelyn is taking a photo shoot, the intimacy coordinator intervenes. As this man tries to do his job, everyone grows increasingly frustrated with him, and he's eventually locked in a bathroom for "comedic" effect.

While Hollywood hasn't been without criticism for intimacy coordinators, this is a bad look for "The Idol" in particular, as the show was widely criticized by insiders as having a toxic set. Furthermore, others have knocked the show for becoming the very thing it thinks it's satirizing, and leaning far too much into the male gaze for a show that was supposed to be seen through a feminist lens. Though Levinson was purportedly brought on to try and "fix" Amy Seimetz' take on the show after Abel "The Weeknd" Tesfaye expressed dissatisfaction, it looks like either Levinson wasn't the guy for the job or — with this being an obvious celebrity vanity project — there simply was nothing worth saving here in the first place.

Still, the other great sin that "The Idol" has committed is delaying the third season of HBO's critical darling, "Euphoria." Not only is creator Sam Levinson's involvement in the controversial new series holding back new episodes of a much better show from coming out, but it's also adding fuel to the fire by being just the kind of series that critics of "Euphoria" have accused that show of being. And the backlash to "The Idol" could very easily derail the eventual return of "Euphoria" just as the show should've been hitting its peak. 

"Euphoria" had just completed its wildly successful second season right before Sam Levinson went over to take care of "The Idol" situation. While the first season of the series was already great, Season 2 blew it out of the water by dialing up the show's tension to 11, and leaning into the trauma that has informed the lives of these characters since the beginning. While it wasn't perfect, with the storyline of Kat (Barbie Ferreira) being a particular issue of contention, "Euphoria" is well on its way to becoming one of HBO's all-time greats.

However, "The Idol" might just chop it down. With the latest news that the third season will feature a time jump, no narrative redemption for Kat, and won't be airing until 2025, viewers are right to wonder whether "The Idol" is remotely worth this level of disruption. 

The early indication seems to be a resounding no, with the show currently posting mid-to-awful ratings on IMDb and Rotten Tomatoesalike. To be fair, we should still stress that there are a whole season's worth of episodes to come that we still haven't seen, but whether they can possibly turn around the weak, faux-edgy stuff we've seen thus far ... well, that remains a highly dubious presumption at this point.

Now, as many would note, a critical trouncing isn't always indicative of how something will be seen in years to come, just as a critical darling doesn't always remain that way. For instance, all-time classics like "The Thing,"  "The Big Lebowski," and "The Shining" were lambasted upon their initial release, while movies like "Crash" were once thought to be high art.

Now that Sam Levinson, who has faced accusations of his own, has invested his time on a show like "The Idol" — which seemingly leans into every single one of his worst impulses — audiences may not be so forgiving of any indication of these same tendencies surfacing in "Euphoria" Season 3. While "Euphoria" has wisely worked to justify its characters' troubling but nuanced arcs, "The Idol" could easily change the way that people watch the show, and for the worse. All that goodwill could be burned away in moments if "Euphoria" recommits any of the same problematic mistakes as "The Idol," perhaps even ruining the show's legacy as a whole.  

It's also worth noting that "The Idol" taking up all of Levinson's creative focus, and delaying "Euphoria" so extensively, could feasibly mean that when he finally turns his full attention to the better show, he'll be rushing it out without the same level of care and commitment as the prior two seasons. Given that viewers are already going to be far more critical this time around, the signs on the wall look ominous. 

Still, what makes this even more frustrating for longtime HBO viewers is that the network has already made this exact kind of mistake in the past. "Boardwalk Empire" was soaring on the heights of its third and fourth seasons when it was announced that the show would have a major time jump and be forced to wrap up in a truncated final season.

By many accounts, this decision was partially made to pave the way for another celebrity vanity project, "Vinyl," a show that couldn't even succeed with Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger pulling for it behind the scenes. To make matters even worse, that show also received a tepid response, only to be subsequently canceled after only a single season.

If your "stop me if you've heard this one" alarm is going off, you're definitely picking up what we're putting down. There's an old idiom in the entertainment industry that you're only as good as your last hit, which is why box office bombs and critical catastrophes are seen as such red flags by studios.

With this in mind, all "Euphoria" fans can hope for at this point is that either "The Idol" gets much better, that public opinion turns around on it, or that somehow its failure doesn't color the third season of "Euphoria." Either way, the creator has his work cut out for him in terms of bouncing back from this whole debacle.