Eight or ten years ago, I knew EXACTLY what my opinion of American Idol was and could give you a POINTED, DETAILED reaction to the news that it was ending.
The best that I could say for it was that it never reached the point of being completely unbearable. Yeah, Simon Cowell was a royal tool, yeah, Stephen Tyler was simply too creepy and spastic for this, yeah, the booing got unbelievably tiresome by about the second episode, yeah, having high school kids sing my flippin’ parents’ music didn’t make a lick of sense. And yet somehow it was a success, and for a while I (who only ever started watching because my parents and then-coworkers were into it) actually got genuinely interested for a while. It harbored no illusions over what it was…an attempt to find the next marketable, photogenic, prepackaged, harmless triple-vanilla flash-in-the-pan fluff pop prince(ss)…so it didn’t have to constantly reinvent itself and implement a hundred annoying gimmicks. Compare that to Dancing With The Stars, where every single minute is so loaded and pretentious and cloying that I get winded just goddam writing about it, or The Voice, which was never anything but a soul-numbing catfight with the “contestants” being largely meaningless pawns.
Come to think of it, if you wanted an example where the reality TV format (which I affectionately refer to as “anuddah-wun-bite-da-dus’”) actually worked, you really couldn’t do much better. Other than season 3 and The Seventh Place Elimination Heard 'Round The World, I can’t really point to a time where there was someone who deserved the win more. Jordin Sparks earned it, David Cook earned it, Kris Allen earned it, hell yes Taylor Hicks earned it, and by the time Lee Dewyze rolled around, my interest had trailed off enough that I couldn’t even name anyone else who was in that season. In fact, the only real shocker I remember was Jennifer Hudson*; otherwise, for the most part, the ones who were supposed to make it did.
And credit where its due: when it comes to actually making music stars, no other show is even close. Kelly Clarkson, the legend in the making, Carrie Underwood, queen of the heartland, Adam Lambert, the insanely popular R&B groundbreaker, Chris Daughtry, the inexplicable alt-rock survivor, Jennifer Hudson, the phoenix, Jasmine Trias, unlikely diva of the Phillippines, Scotty McCreery, the next Garth Brooks, and it goes on. If The Voice produces makes even a quarter of the impact on the music world, it’ll be a damned miracle. When it comes to making a difference, building a legacy, being remembered ten or twenty or eighty years from now, there probably won’t be a realtiy show close to AI. Maybe Survivor. And given that the current contest is all but unrecognizable to the initial fans, even that doesn’t look likely.
- Seriously, you could make a documentary about this. You think 19 Entertainment or Company That Took Over From 19 Entertainment regrets letting her slip through their fingers?