Content Consumed: Watching The Idol and Love Island UK back-to-back

Hey, hey! How’s your week going? I spent the most beautiful weekend in Oregon wine country with my mom and I’m still feeling so good and refreshed.

That is… until I made myself watch episode one of The Idol and the premiere of Love Island UK Season 10 back-to-back last night.

In today’s edition of Content Consumed:
💋 The Idol is not worth your time
👙 Love Island UK’s back, baby
🎥 The Smartless podcast on tour almost doesn’t work

The Idol: Ew, ick, yikes, and why(!?)

Pure curiosity got the best of me, and I watched The Idol last night. I wasn’t planning on it, after all those reviews and that Rolling Stone exposé, but I couldn’t help myself.

In full honesty: I tapped out before the episode completely ended. The Weeknd was giving the worst vibes in the world (I know, intentional) and there was one line in particular that made me say: Nope! We’re done.

The main issue: This show was so, so obviously created by, and written by, and directed by only men.

You can tell in the dialogue, especially the women’s dialogue. You can tell in the decisions the characters make, especially the women’s decisions. You can tell in the wardrobe choices, especially the women’s wardrobes.

The whole thing reeks of misogynistic undertones. God, you can barely call them undertones because it’s all so obvious.

Notes I wrote down while I watched:

• Locking the intimacy coordinator character in a closet as a main plot point is soooo questionable. I get that it’s a satire on the industry but after the reports on the actual show’s set…
• Thank god Lily-Rose Depp is so interesting to look at; otherwise, I’d have lost interest much earlier.
• We get it! Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp) smokes cigs!! But does she have to do it in the sauna too? Every. Single. Scene. Jocelyn has to light up a new cigarette.
• The Weeknd is so gross and sleazy in the club scene, it’s hard to watch. His character makes his entrance into the show by sexually harassing and spotlighting Jocelyn in the middle of the club right after a video of her with c*m all over her face starts trending on Twitter, and she likes it. (That sentence was hard to write. This show sucks.)
• The entire last sequence was so weirdly done. The full tone gave off… supernatural vibes? Like The Weeknd is a vampire? So sinister. The music felt strange. Why’s he sniffing things?
• The line that officially lost me on the show: Rachel Sennott (playing Jocelyn’s assistant) telling Jocelyn that The Weeknd’s character seems “rapey” and Jocelyn replying that she “kind of likes that about him”.

Ugh. Ew. Like I said, I skipped the last scene, which was certainly about to be a nasty—and “rapey”—sex scene.

Love Island: Creepy George, some twists, and more

Love Island UK’s Season 10 premiere aired yesterday and it’s looking alright. The islanders never immediately grab me in the premiere, so I didn’t have the highest expectations, which is healthy after this many years of watching LI.

A breakdown of the premiere:

• It must be noted: no islander will ever be as hot as host Maya Jama and we all need to accept that. Let’s keep it that way.
• LI’s racism gets less subtle every year… or should I say Great Britain’s racism? As usual, the public matched up Islanders by their ethnicity. Shocking, I know.
• Mehdi looks like Picasso. And like Aaron, an Islander from LI Australia and last winter’s UK, he’s certainly bisexual. Not that he’d say that. Btw, he and Ruchee: not a match. We’ll get to that.
• What qualifies as diversity on Love Island cracks me up every time. A half-deaf guy? Sure, sure.
• The plastic surgery has gotten really out of control for some Islanders this season… looking at Ella. Who needs to stop talking about her exes in every conversation she has with a male Islander.
• Ugh. George is so creepy. His face is creepy. The way he “flirts” is creepy. Old homophobic and racist tweets of his have resurfaced and two ex-girlfriends have accused him of abuse. He’s definitely this season’s Jacques.
• Loved Molly calling out Tyrique with the matching lightning bolt tattoo as having a “Pinterest” tattoo. So true. Speaking of, does anyone else think that Molly looks like Jamie Lynn Spears? No offense to Molly—she’s actually my favorite girl so far. Her first-night outfit was bold and reminded me of Tasha from Season 8. Like an eBay spacesuit. She’s such a theater kid too—you can tell by the delivery of her lines and her quest for meme-able face reactions.
• The producers really threw Ruchee and Jess under the bus by asking the girls to step forward if they weren’t comfortable in their couples. Then… not giving them anything for it? Not even a date with the Bombshell?
• We’ve lost our Just Eats talking geckos and parrots — welcome, eBay.

The premiere didn’t draw nearly as many viewers as the previous summer. The theory is that ITV is cannibalizing Love Island’s audience by broadcasting the show twice a year now with a winter season.

You know I’ll keep watching. Onwards!

Smartless’s docuseries success relies on Will Arnett

Smartless, a podcast hosted by Hollywood buddies Will Arnett, Jason Bateman, and Sean Hayes, did a live tour last year. It was all captured in a black-and-white (an interesting creative choice) docuseries called Smartless: On The Road for HBO Max.

It’s entertaining for one reason and one reason only: Will Arnett is one of the funniest people to exist and delivers the best one-liners.

If he weren’t there, this show would be significantly more drab. Half of what comes out of Jason Bateman’s mouth has to do with what he’s eating, his personal hygiene, or his judgment of others that don’t shower every time after they take a shit. (I wish I was kidding.) It’s all very negative. Meanwhile, Sean Hayes just seems… tired. Just tired all the time.

But Will Arnett’s presence keeps spirits high. He knocks Jason down a peg whenever Jason starts complaining too much. He’s self-deprecating in a non-obnoxious way. He brings the best guests for their actual shows.

This is another problem: we spend half of every episode with the three podcast hosts in whatever hotel room they’re in, in whatever city they’re in. We watch them eat breakfast and lunch. We watch Jason ask his assistant for Gas-X. It’s all very… bleh. And the black-and-white screening doesn’t help that either.

I’ll probably keep it on as a background show because I really don’t care for the visuals and I like just listening to Will Arnett’s bits. It’s genuinely like a podcast. Funny, huh?

Some more content I’m consuming today:

• Variety’s Actors on Actors video series, especially Jennifer Coolidge and Jeremy Allen White. They’re so cute.
• Still Demon Copperfield. Going to be reading this one for a while. It’s lengthy and it’s beautiful, with every word worth its space. A true masterclass in storytelling.
• National Dish: Around the World in Search of Food, History, and the Meaning of Home, the book that Penguin Press sent to me by one of my favorite authors of late, Anya von Bremzen. She’s so good at marrying food and travel (hence, her three James Beard awards).
• And, of course, Love Island UK. Every day for the next 8 weeks…

And that’s it for today!

Thanks for reading. Love ya.

Cheers,
Casey

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