Why Sam Levinson’s The Idol became so toxic

The first episode of Sam Levinson’s blistering howl of a teen show Euphoria starts with the lead character – an addict named Rue – announcing she was born three days after 9/11 then hurls the viewer into what this generation has grown up with: terror, drugs, d--- pics and nude selfies, social media, pornography, prescription opioids, gender fluidity and the lascivious attention of the older generation.

To say it caused upset when it appeared on HBO back in 2019 is putting it mildly. Even thirtysomething journalists, barely 10 years older than the characters, found the show terrifying and incomprehensible (“HBO’s Euphoria Made Me Feel Old and Scared,” read one headline). Parents thought the devil was crawling through the screen.

It’s not as if HBO enjoyed a reputation for family friendly dramas at the time. But The Wire and The Sopranos – even Game of Thrones – elicited nothing like this level of shock and awe. And, of course, devotion among its target audience. For a generation born into nihilism, Sam Levinson’s vision of life proved so compelling it’s become HBO’s second most popular show in 20 years – after Game of Thrones.

Adapted from an Israeli series of the same name, Euphoria follows a young and jaded Rue Bennett, played by 26-year-old Zendaya Coleman, as she emerges from rehab and returns to high school. She meets and falls for Jules Vaughn, played by model Hunter Schafer, and does her moderately successful best to stay sober. The series expands to the students at East Highland High School in California grappling with sex, substances and social media in a show that blends the hyperreal drugs madness of Trainspotting with the tormented angst of Beverly Hills 90210.

The first episode of Euphoria’s second season, for instance, contains three penis shots, a drug-dealing grandmother, a girl shooting up in a car, a 12-year-old with face tattoos, sex in a bathroom, a near-overdose on opioids averted by snorting Adderall and a baby eating cigarette butts. It was watched by 19 million people in the US alone.

Levinson writes and directs most episodes himself, citing Todd Hido’s dark photographs of suburbia, Danish film director Carl Dreyer and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights and Magnolia as inspiration for his stylized off kilter take on teenage life.

It didn’t matter that Levinson himself was a white thirtysomething heterosexual man and the son of hyper-successful Hollywood director Barry Levinson whose lived experience should, in theory, have chimed with almost no-one. Yet there’s something about his Bret Easton Ellis approach to TV – high concept, beautifully created, drained of hope – that’s given him the reputation of LA’s most skilful teen whisperer.

He now has a new show – and it was the most controversial drama of 2023 before anyone had seen a single episode. Called The Idol, it initially appeared to be similar fare to Euphoria. Conceived by Levinson with pop star The Weeknd, aka Canadian musician Abel Tesfaye, it stars Tesfaye and another nepo baby Lily-Rose Depp, Johnny’s daughter with Vanessa Paradis. The show – “From the sick & twisted minds of Sam Levinson and The Weeknd”, according to HBO’s pre-publicity – was pitched as a satire of the music industry with Depp’s fading pop superstar Jocelyn falling under the spell of Tesfaye’s mysterious nightclub owner and his secret cult, reminiscent of the bizarre East Coast self-help group turned sex slave recruitment ring NXIVM.

After screening at the Cannes Film Festival, the first episode is now available on Sky in the UK and Max in the UK; by all accounts it doesn’t disappoint. Reviewers have largely praised Depp’s “highly sexualised” performance, which she apparently gives largely in the nude. Variety described the script as “tawdry clichés lifted from Sidney Sheldon novels and softcore porn” that plays like “a sordid male fantasy”. The Hollywood Reporter, meanwhile, concluded: “in trying so hard to be transgressive, the show ultimately becomes regressive”.

Levinson originally co-wrote and co-produced the show with Tesfaye – although it’s slightly funnier to just call him The Weeknd. Director Amy Seimetz, of The Girlfriend Experience, directed 80 per cent of the first season, then departed. Press reports suggested Tesfaye felt the show was leaning too much into a “female perspective”, giving Depp’s character more attention than his.

Levinson took over the director’s chair, reshot much of the show and, according to 13 anonymous cast and crew members talking to the Rolling Stone, took a “dark satire of fame and ended up becoming the thing it was satirizing.” These insiders, detailing scenes reportedly written into the script and eventually deemed too revolting to film, told Rolling Stone the show had gone “wildly, disgustingly off the rails” and become twisted “torture porn”.

Depp, HBO and other cast and crew members have backed Levinson, with Depp calling him “the best director I have ever worked with,” and describing his working practice as “a true collaboration in every way.” HBO said: “The initial approach on the show and production of the early episodes, unfortunately, did not meet HBO standards so we chose to make a change… the team made creative changes they felt were in the best interest of both the production and the cast and crew.”

“There is always a little chaos when things change,” one line producer who’s worked on both iterations told the Telegraph. “We had an amazing crew in both cases – very professional.”

It’s easy to dismiss Levinson, 38, as the classic nepo baby car crash kid. He made his acting debut aged seven in his father’s film Toys, following it up with the Barry Levinson film Bandits, aged 16, and the Hollywood satire What Just Happened? (directed by one Barry Levinson) aged 23. Along the way he acquired a set of addictions – mainly opioids – that were so severe, he has said, he didn’t attend high school.

“I spent the majority of my teenage years in hospitals, rehabs and halfway houses,” Levinson told the audience at an early Euphoria screening. “Sometime around the age of 16, I resigned myself to the idea that eventually drugs would kill me.”

He checked into rehab at 19 to “get off opiates and on a more productive drug like crystal meth,” he joked, adding that he found it hard to write on the former. In rehab he had a moment of clarity: “If I were to die today, who would I be? I’m a thief, I’m an addict, I’ve been sh---y to almost every person in my life that I love. There was this voice that was clear as day that said, ‘Stop f---ing doing drugs.’ I’ve been clean for 14 years.”

He’s wary of blaming his upbringing and parenting for his addiction although offers some clues between the lines, telling screenwriter Neil Landau: “I don’t think there’s a definite cause and effect – I have an incredible relationship with both of my parents now although we had some struggles when I was younger. My father put so much of his emotion and thoughts into his work, but he’s really hard to read in life. When I was young, I was always trying to reconcile those two versions of my dad. I’m still trying to understand what absence means – the absence of love, of comfort, of parenthood. In my younger years, [addiction] would be the only time in which I could quiet all my anxieties and fears about myself and about being harmed, and I could be fully present.”

After drying out he spent a few years writing the Bernie Madoff drama The Wizard of Lies for his father, directing Another Happy Day with Ellen Barkin, whom he briefly dated, and filming his calling card 2018 indie movie Assassination Nation, which hints at the Euphoria themes of teenage misbehaviour over a violent thriller about hackers.

When HBO showed him the pilot for the Israeli Euphoria at a meeting, he asked if he could rewrite it to reflect his own teenage experiences of addiction, anxiety, depression and mood swings. In 2019 it was unleashed to a jaded millennial audience, and they were instantly smitten. The series also receiving knowing approval from a number of former addicts. Its star Zendaya won the 2020 {rimetime Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series – the youngest ever winner and only the second black woman to pick up the gong.

Yet the praise wasn’t universal. America’s addiction charity the Drug Abuse Resistance Education accused Euphoria of ​“misguidedly [glorifying] and erroneously [depicting] high school student drug use”, condemning HBO and media outlets for not recognising its ​“potential negative consequences on school-age children who today face unparalleled risks and mental health challenges.”

Twitter has named Euphoria the most tweeted about show of the decade so far – and the tweets are by no means a love fest, with Levinson singled out for abuse. Videos tagged #SamLevinson have 98.3 million views on TikTok at time of writing; and it’s hard to think of another writer/director that gets anything close to that attention.

When Covid hit, Levinson returned to anti-depressants to cope with the isolation and made a small but still controversial film Malcolm & Marie, with John David Washington as a movie director returning from his movie’s premiere with his wife, played by Zendaya, where a row about him failing to thank her in his speech spirals into a discussion of white critic’s views on black directors.

Once more Levinson based the story on himself – he too failed to thank his own wife Ashley at the premiere of Assassination Nation – but many on social media focused on the discussion of black directors, accusing Levinson of racism for using black actors to criticise black filmmakers.

Levinson and his cast defended the film on the grounds that, with Washington and Zendaya as co-producers and many scenes involving improvisation, the project was a collaboration rather than a Levinson lecture. White critics, Levinson pointed out to Esquire, initially demanded Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing be banned for inciting violence. “If I write something that JD or Z don’t respond to or feel to be honest, then they are going to say something and we’ll work it out,” he explained.

Indeed, many of Levinson’s cast report his willingness to tone down scenes they feel uncomfortable with. Actors Martha Kelly, Sydney Sweeney and Minka Kelly all had scenes changed after they raised concerns over excessive or unnecessary nudity. It’s worth noting that for both Euphoria and The Idol he employs an intimacy co-ordinator.

“Sam is at his best when he’s throwing a bit of his own life story into a project,” one former colleague says. “I can imagine that he’s adding elements of his own experience to The Idol, and honestly his experience of growing up in and around the entertainment industry is very, very dark.”

There’s no doubt that Levinson’s privileged background has fuelled discontent: “Getting free of addiction through rehab is a whole lot easier if you have rich movie director parents,” his former colleague pointed out. There’s also no doubt his tastes are extreme. Fundamentally, however, he makes unsettlingly good TV that tells raw stories based on his own life. Compared with previous shock schlockmeisters such as Quentin Tarantino or David Lynch, he’s collaborative and, if anything, a little too honest. Whatever the truth of the on-set antics of The Idol, it won’t be the last we see of Sam Levinson. The question is, can you bear to watch?