Welcome back to a new edition of ‘Idol Thoughts’, my musings on my family’s thoughts as we watch yet another season of FOX’s top rated reality show pseudo-contest.  Last year I chimed in weekly as the show started to wind down.  This year I debated whether or not to even attempt it – but since we’ve watched almost every episode so far, I figured I might as well kick it off and see where it goes!

One of the questions I asked myself before starting was – is this relevent to GamingWithChildren?  Watching how my kids deal with it, how their peers deal with it, and how much of an impact there is on tween life, I can only say YES!  American Idol is clearly a game – and experiencing something like that with your kids is always a great source of conversation.

It is also interesting that in the past year both of my kids’ musical tastes have changed and matured – my younger son is very much into Muse now, and older son like System of a Down.  They are much less interested in pop music than they were even just a year ago.  And, of course, with my penchant for stuff like Anthony Braxton … it makes it much more about the process and personalities than the songs.

Last year I had a couple of themes – ‘undiscovered talent’ and ‘generic personalities’.  The judges would excoriate anyone who was too different yet chastise the others for not being unique enough, with Simon saying in an interview that the biggest problem was a lack of personality in the contestants …

The whole ‘undiscovered talent’ thing centered around Carly Smithson, who was not really a standout talent yet got constantly pushed by the judges and sent to the bottom three by viewers.

So the question is: now that we are making the transition from judge-decisions to viewer call-ins, how does the show stand in comparison to last year?

Well, in the off-season, producer Nigel Lithgoe left to focus on other stuff, and a new judge was added – Kara DioGuardi.  There was much talk about focusing less on the off-stage drama and more on the ‘singing competition’ as Simon likes to call it.

During the first few weeks we saw auditions all over the country that were done much as in previous years, and had the opportunity to get to know Kara … and spend too much time learning how she pronounces her name. Two immediate changes – the penchant to chase down terrible contestants who thought they were too good and that the judges were all wrong and felt the need to curse and rant and rave has greatly diminished. That is a good thing – it was a tiresome practice that added nothing but a catch-phrase for my kids and their friends “and Simon can kiss my -beep-“. And yes, they all say ‘beep’. The other change was that the addition of a fourth voice meant that the other three had to make more succinct remarks. Well, succinct implies intelligent and ‘to the point’ … so I’ll just say they had to use less time talking.

In general there was a ‘story arc’ to the show – you’d get a bunch of preview fluff about the people in the given town, then some auditions, then previews before the commercials, then auditions afterward, then at the end of each hour a sob story wrapped around a contestant you knew would go on. Of course, that didn’t stop them from spending too much time pandering with oddball contestants … such as ‘bikini girl’. Simon’s treatment of her and repeated attempts to push her along need to be brought up by someone whenever he dares call AI a ‘singing competition’.

Then came Hollywood Week, with the return of the ‘Group Night’. In general those shows were absolute rubbish. Why? Because they focused on the ‘drama queens’ and spent way too little time on the music. We would find out in the final two minutes that folks who were only the previous week called ‘one of the absolute best we’ve seen and just what we need’ were sent packing – and we weren’t shown a second of their audition!

Group night was worse – because of the hour-long show there was 35 minutes of ‘pre-performance drama’ and 25 minutes of performances. It gets worse – of those 25 minutes about one third was spent re-showing various drama and difficulties from the pre-performance footage! If that footage was distributed among the 75+ kids still in the running at that point it would have been one thing, but 90% of what was shown came from two groups! Two groups, consisting of seven people!

The reason that focused coverage is a problem is that it represents everything that has caused ratings to tumble over the last couple of years – too much attention to not very good people with quirky personalities. Basically it was about four people – one angry woman with a foul mouth who I have already forgotten, Nate the super-drama-queen who needs fewer elastics around his head, bikini girl, and Tatiana, who is a mutant with the ability to make everyone within her sphere of influence hate her almost instantly. Of these, Nate and Tatiana went on, the others went home – despite Simon’s protestations which pretty much came down to that a substitution of T&A for actual talent was acceptable sometimes.

Coming out of Hollywood week we spent three hours this week watching the judges pare the selection down to 36. First they had everyone do a last solo performance and sent them to four separate rooms. One was filled with folks obviously continuing, another with people neither talented nor interesting (i.e. weird) enough to continue, and the other two with the in-betweens.

On the final segment of Hollywood, they were in the ‘judge’s mansion’ where everyone went before the panel and found out if they made the final cut. This is what used to be the ‘elevator ride’, but was now a long walk through the garden. In some cases, where the judges were undecided they had two people sing-off against each other. This was another example of Simon looking to shore up the T&A content as a sing-off came between a better singer and a prettier girl. At this point my wife reminded me of the terrible singer a couple of season’s ago who kept wearing progressively shorter and tighter skirts as she managed to make it from week to week.

Before it started, I told my family what I expected – the judges were working off a 3D grid space that looked an overall distribution of looks and styles and singing types that would end up carrying them into a likely top 12 that would look like what they wanted. As a result some of the more talented kids – like the friend of the guy whose wife just died – went home while mediocre singers who forgot words constantly went on. Of course, as I also reminded them, we saw so little actual singing footage of Hollywood Week it is hard to know the truth.

One thing that surprised me a bit – they sent on some quirky personalities. After Sanjaya they only populated the top 36 with people they wouldn’t be embarrassed to have in the finals. The result was dreary and overly-nice folks with no sparks flying or visible conflict. Gone were the occasional looks of ‘oh shaddup and leave already’ we saw previously, replaced with hugs (and rainbows and unicorns).

They sent on three fairly obvious quirky folks – Nathan, Tatiana, and Nick / Normund. Nathan needs to get his meds altered, Normund missed the last bus to Vegas, and Tatiana is just a sociopath who might when bring in an Uzi when she gets voted off. The interesting thing is that sites like ‘Vote for the Worst’ are absolutely frothing at the mouth that they have three shots at another Sanjaya!

Next week the fans start voting, and hopefully things will get interesting … by 9PM last night neither kid was with us and neither one cared about anyone but ‘blender dude’ (Danny Gokey, whose wife died just before the auditions). Don’t worry … either way I’ll let you know!

Tags: Misc, Television