The first electric car for most people will be a used one.
Did you know that since January of this year, thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, you can get up to $4,000 back on your federal taxes if you buy a used electric car? And depending on where you live, your state will also knock thousands of dollars off the sticker price? And if you’re really lucky, your power utility might offer up to a $6,000 rebate as well?
With the supply chain shocks of the Covid-19 pandemic wearing off and a fresh buffet of juicy enticements, a used EV right now can be one of the best bargains on the road, especially if you can pay cash. That is, if you can get your hands on one, and if your dealer knows about all the perks.
“Overall, used EVs can actually be a pretty good deal for consumers because someone else has already taken the biggest hit on the depreciation of that vehicle,” said Chris Harto, a senior policy analyst at Consumer Reports. “But they still deliver the same fuel savings and can maybe even often offer greater maintenance and repair savings over time compared to a used gasoline vehicle.”
As some buyers have learned, however, sellers don’t always know about all the sweeteners available.
“The Hyundai dealership knew next to nothing about the car,” said Jeremy Conrad, who bought a 2019 Hyundai Ioniq plug-in hybrid car earlier this year in Pennsylvania. “They didn’t even know if there was a tax credit. I had to show them the list of eligible used cars on the government’s website, and even then they said to check with whoever does my taxes to ask about the tax credit.”
Joseph Wall ran into the same problem buying a used Chevrolet Bolt in North Carolina. “My local CarMax had no idea about the used EV tax credit,” he said. “I had to talk to the business manager who asked corporate and got informed on it that way.”
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Paul Chinn/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
Confusion around tax credits is just one of several speed bumps ahead of buying used EVs, even as new electric car sales are accelerating. About one in 10 new cars sold last year around the world was electric. But to truly graduate from a luxury bauble to a reliable workhorse and to shift light-duty vehicles off of fossil fuels, electrics have to take over the used car market.
This transition is also critical for the US strategy to limit climate change: Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the country, and light-duty vehicles comprise 57 percent of this sector’s carbon dioxide output. The average car stays on the road for 12 years, so for EVs to win the race to decarbonization, they need to outrun the existing fleet on cost and performance.
However, even as carmakers are offering more electrics in their lineups, they’re also making them bigger and more expensive.
The average new electric car cost $66,000 last year, compared to the overall average new car at $48,000. Some EVs are now so pricey that they don’t qualify for tax credits. The IRS set a price cap of $80,000 for new electric vans, trucks, and SUVs and a $55,000 limit for all other vehicles. For used electrics, the ceiling is $25,000.
And many new car buyers don’t need the help. According to J.D. Power, two-thirds of plug-in hybrid and battery EV owners earn more than $100,000.
The key to starting the engine of electrification and revving up EV market share is to help people buy more used EVs. Americans purchase roughly 17 million new cars each year and 40 million used cars. The used EV market poised to become massive too, as new cars diffuse into secondhand car lots.
“Even expensive new cars become affordable used cars,” Harto said. “It’s just a matter of time.”
Right now, though, used EVs currently make up a tiny fraction of total car sales. Of the 250 million light-duty vehicles on the road in the US — cars, minivans, SUVs, and light trucks — only around 1 percent is electric. The majority of EVs are still in the driveways of their first owners. Drivers bought more than 42,000 used EVs at dealerships last year, but most car dealers don’t have any electric offerings on their lots, new or used.
So if you’re in the market for a pre-owned electric car, it can be tricky to find one, to take advantage of the tax breaks, and to figure out whether the car is reliable. But experts have some tips to make sure you’re getting the best deal, and there are strategies to make more EVs available on used car lots.
The used EV market is volatile, but it’s beginning to settle down
While used EVs are a tiny market right now, they aren’t new. The Tesla Model S is now in its 11th year of production and its earliest generations are in the hands of second or third owners.
However, the electric car market has gone through some wild swings. During the Covid-19 pandemic, some buyers actually managed to sell used EVs for more than the new sticker price. But prices have begun to fall over the past few months, including for popular electrics like the Tesla Model 3, the Toyota Prius Prime, the Hyundai Ioniq, and the Nissan Leaf. With interest rates rising, however, it’s now more costly to get a loan to buy a car, new or used, so cash buyers have an advantage.
Another concern is how EVs fare in the real world over a long time. In terms of reliability, used EVs have a big advantage over internal combustion engines because they have fewer mechanical parts. There’s less that can go wrong, reducing the rising upkeep costs often associated with older cars.
The big, unique maintenance worry with EVs and plug-in hybrids is the battery. Although they’re increasingly sophisticated, EV batteries, like all batteries, lose capacity over time and can wear out faster with extensive fast-charging. That, in turn, can eat into the overall range of the car. Replacing the battery can cost half the sticker price of an EV — if not more.
Battery range worries can dissuade some buyers, but aside from a few high-profile recalls, most EV batteries have proven quite durable.
Recurrent, a research firm that studies the performance of EVs, tracked the performance of more than 15,000 of these vehicles in the real world, looking at how their range changed over time as a proxy for battery health.
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Sergei Gapon/AFP via Getty Images
“We’ve been really surprised to see how well most batteries are holding up,” said Liz Najman, lead researcher at Recurrent. “Most cars still have 85 to 90 percent of their original battery capacity.”
Battery replacements actually tend to be pretty rare. At the same time, many manufacturers offer far more generous warranties for electric components than they do for combustion systems. Ford, for instance, offers a warranty for five years or 60,000 miles on conventional drivetrains but raises it to eight years or 100,000 miles for electric drives. Chevrolet also offers an eight-year or 100,000-mile warranty on EV battery components. Tesla’s battery warranty starts at 100,000 miles or eight years.
These warranties are usually transferable when the vehicle is resold. That can offer buyers some peace of mind. “To be as covered as possible in a used car, I targeted the Bolt EV specifically because it would get a new eight-year, 100,000-mile warranty with the battery replacement,” said Wall.
But many other drivers are still anxious about battery performance over time, according to Najman. “I don’t think there’s a ton of awareness of how long these battery warranties are,” she said.
In fact, despite the more robust warranties, EVs tend to have lower resale values than conventional cars, according to Brian Moody, executive editor for Kelley Blue Book. After 36 months, an electric car retains about 63 percent of its value, compared to 66 percent for an internal combustion engine.
“But when you go out to five years, an internal combustion engine car would retain 46 percent of its value, while the electric car would only retain 37 percent of its value,” Moody said. For most EVs, that’s well within manufacturers’ warranties.
It’s not clear why there’s such a big gap. One factor could be that used car buyers at lower incomes are also less likely to have chargers at home, meaning they would have to rely on the fledgling public charging system. In many areas, these chargers can be sparse and unreliable.
That’s one reason why plug-in hybrids are in such demand among used car buyers, even as manufacturers are moving away from them. That includes Conrad, who bought a plug-in Ioniq. “I regularly drive 180 to 200 mile round trips on the weekend, and I worried that especially in the winter an older EV might not make the trip. And there aren’t many public charging stations in central Pennsylvania,” Conrad said.
Over time, though, Kelley Blue Book’s Moody expects that electric vehicles will close the gap in resale values. Potential used EV buyers should look for cars and trucks that are lightly used, under warranty, and ideally certified pre-owned from a nearby dealer. The odometer reading isn’t as important as how the battery has been treated, since frequent fast-charging and extreme weather conditions tend to cause more wear than topping up slowly in a garage.
“It’s not exactly about the miles only,” Moody said. “It’s about how the battery is charged and cared for up until that point.”
How to take advantage of tax breaks for used EVs
Tax breaks and discounts can help close the equity gap for cleaner cars and direct the benefits to where they’re needed the most. For instance, EVs lead to near-term air quality improvements. That’s a huge upside for low-income people, especially if they live in areas that already suffer higher pollution.
“The incentives for used vehicles are more important because that’s where more moderate-income and lower-income households enter the vehicle markets,” said Scott Hardman, a researcher at the Plug-in Hybrid & Electric Vehicle Research Center at UC Davis. “They will need help making this jump.”
The trouble is that many dealers don’t know what’s out there, and the incentives change depending on your state, your income level, and your vehicle.
The process proved so frustrating for Jonathan Seiden that he put together his own guide for used EV tax credits. He even created a template form for dealers to send to the IRS because he couldn’t find an official one from the government.
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SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg via Getty Images
“I was kind of shocked that no one had ever heard of it. Everyone was just saying ‘oh, you’re wrong, it’s only for new vehicles, it’s only for vehicles assembled in North America,’” said Seiden, who ended up buying a used Hyundai Ioniq in Virginia. “That caused me to kind of go down the rabbit hole of the IRS documentation around it.”
To see if you’re eligible for a federal used EV tax credit, check the IRS’s list of qualifications and its list of eligible car models. The tax credit of up to $4,000 only applies to used EVs and plug-in hybrids that cost less than $25,000. Only joint filers making less than $150,000 or individuals making less than $75,000 can avail it. Since it’s a tax credit, if your tax bill is less than $4,000, you don’t get the full amount. And be sure to file Form 8936 with your returns.
Next, check to see what state-level incentives are available and see if your power provider offers any discounts as well. Kelley Blue Book has a helpful list of what’s out there.
The complicated economics of getting more EVs on the road
EV prices are coming down for buyers, but that’s just a first step. Beyond lowering the sticker price for buyers, Hardman suggested it might be worth making subsidies more readily available for EV leases. Incentives tend to be a bigger factor for people who lease cars than those who buy them, and leased cars are typically held for three years before being resold. “That is quite a good way to increase the supply of used vehicles,” he said.
Another hurdle to clear is car dealers. According to the Sierra Club, of the dealers they surveyed that didn’t sell any electrics last year, 45 percent said that they wouldn’t sell one even if they had the opportunity to do so. That’s due in part to the fact that dealers can generate up to half of their revenue with repairs and maintenance, something EVs don’t need as much. Many manufacturers also want dealerships to make expensive upgrades like installing fast chargers and training mechanics to work on EVs before they will give dealers a crack at selling electrics.
That means the car-buying process needs to change. Manufacturers like Ford will let you search for dealers that are EV certified on their website and see their inventory online. All-electric companies like Tesla, Lucid, Rivian, and Polestar are trying to bypass dealers altogether and sell directly to customers, but some states still have laws that prevent direct-to-consumer purchases. Getting rid of these barriers could help these companies lower costs and reach more customers.
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Soeren Stache/Picture Alliance via Getty Images
It’s worth stepping back to remember why there’s such an interest in deploying electric cars and trucks to begin with: They’re a means to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution. But they’re not always the most effective way of achieving this goal.
“Our policies are currently not well-suited to maximizing the environmental value,” said David Rapson, a professor of economics at the University of California Davis who studies vehicle electrification.
Incentives for used EVs are a case in point. They’re effectively a second subsidy for a single car, making them one of the more costly ways to curb emissions.
“Maybe we want to make EVs more affordable in the used market, but the trade-off is we’re getting fewer carbon savings per dollar of subsidy spent when we do that,” said Rapson, who is also a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas. “An alternative policy that’s going to be much more effective from a carbon reduction perspective is putting a price on carbon.”
Another tactic is to reduce the need to drive altogether. Better public transit and smaller electric vehicles like bicycles could yield more bang for the buck than EV subsidies. Electrifying government fleets like school buses and postal trucks can achieve higher economies of scale than private cars.
Still, the majority of Americans drive to work every day and until there’s an alternative, there will be a massive market for EVs. The question is when electric cars will cross the tipping point where they’re cheap and abundant, with plenty of places to charge up and no more subsidies are required, creating a cycle that will ripple through the whole auto sector. So when EVs do finally take over the road, most drivers will be the second owner of their first electric car.
Reports that we’re becoming crappier humans over time are greatly exaggerated.
Pretty much every generation seems to believe that morality is declining. In ancient Judaism, the rabbis had a saying: “The earlier generations are to the current generation as men are to donkeys.” The Victorians imagined that people living before the Industrial Revolution were more respectful, civil, and honest. After World War I, Europeans looked back to the Victorians as paragons of moral superiority.
And in this century, surveys have shown that people in at least 60 countries around the globe believe that morality is declining.
But that idea is just an illusion, according to a new paper published in Nature.
Its lead author, the psychologist Adam Mastroianni, says the paper was born out of his own emotional reaction to constantly hearing people grumble about how humanity is going downhill — “Back in the day, you could leave your door unlocked at night,” “Used to be you could trust someone’s word,” “Kids these days!” — without any real evidence for thinking that.
“I had a lifetime of spite build-up!” he told me, laughing. But, more seriously, he added, “If people are less kind than they used to be, that’s a disaster. Interpersonal morality is the glue that holds our society together; lose that glue and it all falls apart. If that’s really going on, then that’s the story of the century and social scientists should be trying to get to the bottom of it.”
So together with Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert, Mastroianni decided to find out: Has morality actually declined? And if it hasn’t, why do people think it has?
Nope, morality hasn’t declined
For starters, we should clarify that “morality” means different things to different people.
Mastroianni and Gilbert are not using it to refer to sweeping changes, like the abolition of slavery or the granting of rights to women and LGBTQ people. (By that standard, there’s no doubt most societies, including the US, have improved morally.) They’re using the word to mean something like everyday kindness, honesty, and basic human decency.
That tracks with the definition used in the many, many surveys covering this topic since 1949. In US surveys alone, Mastroianni and Gilbert found 177 questions asking a total of 220,772 Americans things like: “Do you think that over the last few decades our society has become less honest and ethical in its behavior, more honest and ethical, or has there been no change?” On 84 percent of the questions, a majority of participants said morality had declined.
This isn’t an American exception. In dozens of other nations, surveys have found similar results. So, people all over the world believe that humanity is becoming less kind and ethical over time. And as Mastroianni and Gilbert discovered by running their own surveys, it’s not just old people or conservatives who believe this. Liberals believe it, as do young people, who don’t even have first-hand memories of how people used to be.
When Mastroianni and Gilbert asked respondents what was causing the supposed moral decline, they didn’t attribute it all to “kids these days!” It’s not just that old nice people are dying and being replaced by young selfish people — it’s also that humans in general are becoming less nice in everyday interactions, they said.
But is that true?
The answer, as best we can tell, is no.
There’s no measuring device, like a thermometer for morality, that we can use to objectively determine shifting levels of morality over the centuries. So Mastroianni and Gilbert pored over the next best thing: decades’ worth of surveys. If morality had been declining for years, as respondents in every generation claim, then meaningful changes over time should be visible in people’s answers to questions like, “Were you treated with respect all day yesterday?” and, “Are people generally helpful, or are they looking out for themselves?”
But the researchers found no significant changes. Not in the US surveys, and not in the surveys of other countries, either.
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Courtesy Adam Mastroianni
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Courtesy of Adam Mastroianni
We also have a lot of data from economists, who for decades have been bringing people into the lab to participate in the Prisoner’s Dilemma or the Public Goods Game, where you can make a generous choice or a greedy choice, like giving some money away or keeping it for yourself.
In 2022, a separate research team published a meta-analysis of over 500 of these social dilemmas, going back to 1956. They suspected they’d find that cooperation rates had declined, with people becoming greedier over time. Instead, they found that cooperation rates have increased by about 10 percentage points over the past six decades.
Mastroianni acknowledges that these lab games take place in an artificial environment and they may not perfectly reflect how people act in the real world. Still, he told me, “It’s certainly at odds with the idea that people are fundamentally less prosocial today than they were a generation ago.”
Why people wrongly believe that humanity is becoming less moral
Okay, so everyday morality isn’t really declining. Then why do people believe it is?
Mastroianni and Gilbert hypothesize that two well-known psychological phenomena are working together to produce the illusion.
First is the biased exposure effect. We know from previous studies that humans pay more attention to negative information than to positive information, and the media reinforces that tendency by focusing on bad news. (As the newsroom expression goes, “If it bleeds, it leads.”) Because we’re mostly exposed to negative data about society, we get the impression that moral behavior is at a low.
Second, we’ve got the biased memory effect. When people think of positive and negative events from the past, they’re more likely to forget the negative ones or misremember them in a positive light. The negative events are also more likely to lose their emotional potency over time. This could be partly why we have such a rosy view of morality in the past — we’ve quite literally forgotten the bad times.
Put these two biases together, and you can see how we might end up with the illusion of moral decline. The hypothesis also accurately predicts that both old and young people will perceive moral decline and that people will perceive more decline over longer spans of time.
So next time someone starts bemoaning “kids these days” — or, more importantly, next time you hear a politician claim, “Our country is garbage right now, but elect me and I’ll make our country great again!” — remember this. You’ll be ready with your comeback, and you’ll have the evidence to back it up.
The “edgy” sex at the center of The Idol is the least interesting part of the show.
There was a time before porn was widely available on the internet when horny teenage boys had to be resourceful. Stealing Playboys and Penthouses from older siblings; ruining their eyesight watching scrambled, discolored, wavy boobs on the Spice Channel; mentally cataloging which R-rated movies had nudity; staying up past midnight and tuning into Cinemax After Dark.
Watching The Idol, which premiered on HBO this month, it’s easy to believe these virgin gremlins are exactly who created the hour-long drama.
Officially, Sam Levinson (Euphoria, Malcolm & Marie), Abel Tesfaye (a.k.a. the singer The Weeknd), and nightlife entrepreneur Reza Fahim are behind this supposedly “prestige” drama about the jagged, gory bits of stardom. The show premiered two episodes at the Cannes Film Festival, which added to its edgy reputation, while Tesfaye’s involvement invites a meta-narrative, as he himself is a pop star who has visually and musically tried to break and reinvent his image multiple times.
The three, however, have been criticized for not creating a show with something specific to say about idol worship or how simultaneously valuable and worthless fame can be, so much as a nipple-forward, soft-core porn series that thinks itself too serious to be called that.
Given the handful of shallowly written episodes we’ve seen so far, The Idol is actually both shows at once. Underneath its desperate, pulsating, virgin horniness is a canny, bleak comedy about the nefarious people in a pop star’s orbit — the people whose talent is to manage, support, create, and make money off the actual talent. They’re vampires who walk in the Bel Air sun, horrendously greedy and relentlessly disappointed.
That’s a far better show, and one that, frustratingly, The Idol seems less interested in being.
The Idol is Phantom of the Opera, but with more boobs
Even though she possesses a name that’s destined for an office job, the swarm of publicists and managers and Live Nation promoters who orbit Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp) tell us that she is the brightest star in the music universe, even as she’s coming back to music after a mental breakdown and the death of her mother.
Jocelyn’s team has orchestrated a sexy single called “World Class Sinner” that they hope, and Jocelyn hopes, will affirm the return of pop music’s bad-girl princess. Though she and her team both crave success, they have disparate views of what that looks like. Jocelyn wants to be an artist that resembles something closer to her true self. Her team wants Jocelyn to sell records.
Being “bad” in pop music, of course, is very different from real-life villainy: It’s almost always expressed in sexual naughtiness. No one can really be that bad or that wild if they’re in the business of selling music to millions of consumers. Levinson and Tesfaye drive this home with Jocelyn’s painfully innocuous single (which Tesfaye co-wrote). “I’m a good girl gone bad,” Jocelyn purrs. “Get in the car, drive fast, get on the road, and take off my clothes.”
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Eddy Chen/HBO
Even Jocelyn admits to the hollowness of her song. She wonders to her best friend-slash-personal assistant Leia (Rachel Sennott) if the whole thing is cheesy.
What Jocelyn wants is to be badder — badder than this song and what the people around her will tolerate. Jocelyn smokes cigarettes. Jocelyn has sex. Jocelyn takes nudes, one of which goes viral in the first episode. Jocelyn also seems to enjoy having her nipples out, facing the world. This isn’t brilliant writing but it is, alas, what we’re given.
Good girls would also never go to a club and have a one-night stand with a rat-tailed dude named Tedros (Tesfaye). But Jocelyn does. Jocelyn has never met a man like Tedros before because usually men with rat tails aren’t as confident, and, I guess, they usually aren’t as knowledgeable about music. The club owner even has a line about Prince’s pop music genius, which seems absolutely profound to Jocelyn (and exponentially less profound to anyone not Jocelyn).
The whole tale is a hornier version of the Phantom of the Opera, the Andrew Lloyd Webber spectacular about an ingénue named Christine who becomes a star singer under the tutelage of a guy who’s literally an underground producer. Lloyd Webber’s gothic extravaganza explores the idea of psychosexual obsession, perversion, and darkness as part of an artistic seduction. The Phantom wants Christine for himself, manipulating her with each visit — much to the ire of her high-society circle.
Tedros = Phantom. Jocelyn = Christine. But instead of teaching her how to become a better singer by crooning at her, Tedros introduces her to what Levinson and Tesfaye want you to believe is kinky sex. The illicitness of the sex Jocelyn is having with Tedros, according to the show’s logic, unlocks a better understanding of Jocelyn’s own identity.
In what’s been dubbed “the worst sex scene of all time,” Tedros blindfolds Jocelyn and proceeds to bark commands at her — sentences peppered with phrases like “suffocate you with my cock.” This scene is scored with a swooning sax solo, ooo-ooo-ing up and down octaves. Meanwhile, Tedros’s acquaintance and acolyte (it’s hinted that Tedros is running a cult) Chloe (Suzanna Son) secretly watches and fondles herself. According to the closed captioning, “Jocelyn gagging” sounds are also woven in.
Levinson and Tesfaye have been adamant in the press surrounding The Idol that the show is purposely edgy and controversial, and is somehow pushing the boundaries of sex and nudity on TV. There’s even a moment in the first episode that makes an intimacy coordinator the butt of a joke.
In an interview about this specific sex scene, Tesfaye slightly walked that notion back, asserting that the sex scene was supposed to be cringey and purposely bad. It was supposed to cause discomfort, he claimed. Tesfaye’s about-face feels like a pivot in response to the critiques, waving away the failure to thrill as purposeful camp instead of an intentionally kinky sex scene. It feels neither kinky nor campy but rather like it was conceived by someone who’s only ever had awful sex.
The most fascinating parts of the show have nothing to do with sex
Tedros’s bad romance threatens everything Jocelyn has worked for and, by extension, everyone that works for Jocelyn. Jocelyn is, yes, a person, but she represents far more than that. She’s a multimillion-dollar brand that has been carefully created, cultivated, marketed, and strategized to maximize album sales, song streams, and concert revenue. Every move Jocelyn makes is closely watched by her assistant, a creative director, a manager, another manager, a publicist, and a record label executive.
Examining this dynamic, through satire and blistering comedy, is where the show actually gets clever.
At the top of Jocelyn Inc.™ is Nikki Katz (Jane Adams), the monstrously cynical record label executive in charge of Jocelyn’s new album. One moment she’s explaining how mental illness is that little push that makes unattainable women sexier to the sort of people who live in flyover states, and the next, she tells a Vanity Fair reporter (Hari Nef) that mental health is truly so important and that Jocelyn is prioritizing hers like “that Black girl in the Olympics.”
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Eddy Chen/HBO
Nikki’s presence raises a bigger question: What if Jocelyn is just clever marketing? What if the biggest pop star on the planet is only the biggest pop star on the planet because a bunch of ghoulish people in a room decided years ago that her waist-to-hip proportion, the symmetry of her face, and the tone of her voice — though the only voice the audience hears is lip-synced and auto-tuned — fit some kind of golden ratio?
With Nikki and the rest of Jocelyn’s entourage, The Idol shrugs off its uber-serious tone for a comedic one. Adams, who just about slithers away with the entire show, delivers Nikki’s cruel lines with a whisper of humor, sliding into absurdity, which ultimately allows the show to really tap into something sinister. She doesn’t care who Jocelyn is, nor does she see her as a person. Jocelyn exists to pay the bills. When Jocelyn no longer sells out arenas, Jocelyn no longer exists.
It’s possible for someone as awful as Nikki to elicit laughs because the reality — that the music industry is actually full of Nikkis ready to run their wards into the ground — is scarier than Tedros and his ChatGPT sexual commands.
Sennott’s performance as Leia also leans into the idea of pop star as farce. Jocelyn is housing Leia in a mansion and paying her to do menial tasks like open the curtains in her room and make her coffee. Despite being Jocelyn’s bestie, she’s just as much an instrument of the management team, always saying yes and always telling Jocelyn she’s great. (Leia’s only input in the first episode is explaining that the taxonomy of bukkake is the presence of multiple men.) Like the rest of them, Leia depends on Jocelyn’s success for her livelihood. If Jocelyn really can’t trust her best friend to be honest with her, there’s really no one she can trust.
The Idol wants to be about the ways a pop star breaks, not to mention the way pretty, perfect pop princesses have always been an illusion. Beneath the scrim of glamour, it’s a world of monsters. That’s not a bad idea, given the way society is re-examining how we treated Britney and Christina, and how we still might be treating the likes of Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, and Selena Gomez.
The problem is that The Idol is deeply infatuated with using serious, kinky, shocking (!) sex as a shorthand for rebellion and its own depth. That, along with Tefaye’s corny performance, becomes its undoing.
Each time The Idol delves into how provocative sex and light cultism unlocks Jocelyn’s artistic side — or, rather, what she thinks artistry is — Levinson’s and Tesfaye’s storytelling gets in its own way, squandering any kind of emotional impact.
The better, scarier version of The Idol is on a parallel track with the one it’s giving us: a bleak comedy about a pop star who might not be that talented, sexy, or artistic but can be engineered to appear to be all of those things. The manager strategizing how to parlay mental illness into album sales is far more sinister than the creep and his creepy sex. It’s a shame that The Idol is so much more interested in the latter.
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