At Variety: Will ‘Idol’ be upstaged again at the Emmys? The Amazing Race has beat out American Idol for an Emmy award for four years in a row now, even though AI stomps TAR in the ratings. This article looks at that phenomenon, and at the likelihood of that changing this year.
Thursday’s upfronts are a double-dose of blah. Both the CW and FOX made their announcements today, and I’m finding it hard to even find anything to say about them.
American Idol and House are both coming back, of course. There was no doubt since they’re FOX’s two biggest shows. And also the only two I watch. The Loop is on the canceled list, which is funny because its second season still hasn’t premiered yet. I watched the first season last year, and thought it was an enjoyable enough show, but I was shocked last spring when they renewed it. But it was being held back “for midseason”, they said, and now here it is May and it still isn’t on the air. And now it’s gone. I guess they know how to treat a show they don’t like.
There was nothing on The CW that I watched last year. This spring brings several cancellations that are big news, but I never watched the shows so I can’t really get worked up about them. The only reason the cancellations of Gilmore Girls and Veronica Mars register at all in my brain is because I listen to the TV Guide Podcast, and they love those shows over there. So it’s sort of sympathy by association for me to look at the news and go, “Huh.” Other than that, it’s the CW, so who cares?
As for the new shows? On either network? I saw an episode of Kitchen Nightmares, the British version, when I was in Canada, and it was funny but mostly because of all the cussing, which you can’t get away with in America, and because the restaurateur that Gordon Ramsey was helping looked and sounded just like the Travelocity gnome. So maybe I’ll give that show a watch, although it should be on the Food Network. And Reaper, on the CW, might be worth one episode, but it’s going to have to go a long way to prove itself.
And that’s about the level of excitement I have for those two networks. If you want to find out more, here are the links.
Fox: TV Squad coverage, Zap2it coverage, new shows.
The CW: TV Squad coverage, Zap2it coverage, new shows.
I didn’t think it would actually happen. I was hoping, but I didn’t have any faith in America. I didn’t think Blake was going to make it all the way to the final two on American Idol, because American Idol is a karaoke contest and Blake is anything but karaoke. But I was proved wrong, and for once Dial Idol was proved wrong. My faith in the country was restored, and more importantly my faith in American Idol was restored. With someone like Blake making it all the way through, this show is edging ever slightly closer to the kind of show it should be. I mean, imagine a show with twelve Melindas, all singing the same songs the same ways and hitting the same glory notes over and over. Now imagine a show with twelve Blakes, each one pushing the boundaries every week and actually creating something new at every turn. Which show would you rather see?
When Maroon 5 was playing last night, I wished Blake could have stepped in as lead singer, because he would have been better at it. That kind of says everything. He’s already better than the established acts out there.
I wrote in the comments at TV Squad (comment #586! Woo!):
The thing is that we’re not trying to find the best technically proficient singer in the county. If that were so, we’d have twelve classically trained opera singers up on stage. American Idol is all about finding performers, not just singers, about finding pop stars. And vocal talent is only one small piece of being a performer, being a pop star. So what if Melinda had the best voice? I also fast-forwarded through most of her performances because there was nothing there to grab me, no excitement. No originality. They were boring ballads that only served the purpose of building up to a glory note at the end, and that’s what American Idol has been for six years now, and it’s time to change it.
If this was really a singing competition, there would be no band, no lights, no stage, just each person singing a cappella in a dark room. And nobody would tune in. Because as much as anyone wants to protest about the “purity” of the competition, it’s not just about singing. The freshness, excitement, and originality that Blake brings to the stage every week is exactly the kind of thing American Idol should be seeking out, should be rewarding, and I’m glad to see that it’s actually happening for once.
Blake smells new, like the 21st century. Melinda and Jordin smell old and stodgy, like the 20th century. And who you like depends on whether you’re the kind of person who prefers to look backwards or forwards.
It’s not that there’s anything against Melinda. She’s a great singer, and she really deserved third place. She could have even deserved second place, right behind Blake. But she’s not going to be selling a lot of albums, because that’s not the kind of albums people buy. Look at Taylor Hicks. He had a wildly popular run on the show, but then after that his career just died. And I think the same will happen to Melinda. Because out in the real world, there’s no place for her kind of music, for her kind of singing. Where Blake is contemporary and making the same kind of music that is selling right now, that is being played in the clubs and on the radio. And that’s why I see him being the big winner in the real world after the show, just like Chris Daughtry turned out to be the big winner from last year, because his kind of rock is really hot right now.
Idol success doesn’t mean anything, doesn’t get you anything. It just gives you a nudge in the right direction, and you have to run with it in the big scary world of music just like everyone else. Even Jordin, if she wins, I don’t see having a huge career unless she reinvents herself. Blake is like 2008 in a box, all ready to go, ready to hit big. He’s going to launch out of Idol like a Saturn V rocket, headed straight up. Melinda and Jordin are Cessnas by comparison, going nowhere, and going there slow.
Now the real challenge for American Idol is to top last year’s finale show. I don’t think they can do it. Meatloaf nearly having a heart attack on stage? The Clay Aiken wannabe (also known as “Clay Gaiken”) almost peeing his pants? Prince showing up just to collect a paycheck and getting back in the limo before the next commercial break? Hasslehoff crying? That whole two hours was TV genius, and it’s going to be impossible to beat it.
Even if Blake wins and manages to make the horrible coronation song listenable.
I know I spend a lot of time talking about the bad stuff that’s on TV. Charla and Mirna, Sanjaya, Donald Trump. And it’s not very often that I bring up the good stuff, of which there is a lot. And one of the best, right now, is Blake Lewis.
Blake is probably the best thing that has ever happened on or to American Idol. Just like Sanjaya was kind of a living embodiment of everything that is wretched and cynical about the show, Blake is kind of like the shining light, the hope, the optimism. Blake is what American Idol should be, but isn’t. Twelve people who are really gifted musicians and performers getting together to shape the future of pop music. Instead of being all about glory notes and spotlights, and crying teenage girls, Blake is all about invention. When Blake’s really at his best, like he was last night, he goes beyond “make it your own” and actually makes you forget the original version. It’s not just a karaoke version, or a cabaret performance, it’s a true cover, something that is in seriously short supply on this show.
Now, the big question on my mind is how Blake slipped past the process to make it this far. Because just like the producers were very much pissed off about Sanjaya becoming popular, there has to be a part of them that hates what Blake is doing and the cracks he’s exposing every time he gets up on stage. I mean, last night everybody was talking about what a “risk” he was taking, and how he was “rolling the dice”. But the thing is, what Blake did last night is something we should be seeing every week on this show, new frontiers being broken left and right. And for them to make such a big deal out of what he did reveals the truth: American Idol is a karaoke bar, and they’re not really looking for somebody to try anything new or break any barriers. The judges let him off easy last night, which was actually kind of a surprise. I was expecting their reaction to be closer to the reception he got when he reimagined “Keep Me Hanging On.”
So how do you solve a problem like Blake? I think that next year, when they’re sitting down to pick out the Final 24 for American Idol 7, they’re first of all going to give serious thought to the Sanjaya Issue, and maybe not cast so many people that openly suck. But they might also look at the Blake Issue, and not bring anyone on board who’s too exotic, too original, who strays too far away from the karaoke zone where they want everybody to be. And that’s America’s loss, because now that we’ve seen Blake we’ve seen what this show can really be, and to settle for anything less from now on just isn’t going to sit right.
See what you’ve done, America? You made Sanjaya cry.
You bastards.
You know, my wife has hit on the best way to watch American Idol. Just keep your finger on the TiVo’s Fast Forward button at all times, and don’t be afraid to use it. Like when Martina McSomebody goes on and on about anything having to do with country music? [Beep boop]. If you don’t like the first three bars of a song? [Beep boop]. Thursday’s show is 85% filler? [Beep boop] You get through the whole show in about 20 minutes this way, and it really makes things go smoother.
I’ve also found that when my wife and I talk about the show we don’t use anybody’s real name. Everyone has a nickname, and that’s all we use when we talk. Like Blake’s nickname is “Beatbox”. LaKisha, Melinda and Jordin have all been lumped together as “The Supremes”. Haley’s nickname was “Boobie Girl” and Chris Sligh was “Jack Osbourne”. Chris Richardson is “Justin Timberlake” (once you’ve been put in the box, you can’t get out), and Phil of course is “Gollum”. Sanjaya’s nickname, oddly enough, is “Sanjaya”. He’s become such an iconic character in popular culture that it’s like he’s transcended reality, and now every time he appears on stage he seems to be doing an impersonation of himself. Like when you see George Bush Sr you think of Dana Carvey. The archetype of “Sanjaya” is actually ages-old, going back as long as there’s been popular music. Style over talent. The hair. The eyes. The swooning girls. Frankie Avalon and the Monkees. Fucking Britney Spears. This is nothing new, and this is the kind of thing American Idol has been banking on for six years now. This is the reason I always say American Idol is not a singing competition, because there are about one hundred and fifty different things that motivate people to vote, and if you listed them all and ranked them you’d find “voice” very far down the list. Obviously voice counts for something, because really what else does LaKisha have going for her? She’s 1-for-149. But Sanjaya is just the opposite, he’s 149-for-1, and it’s what’s keeping him in this thing. It’s what’s kept American Idol on the air for so long. It’s what’s kept record executives in business for so long. It’s been going on for longer than any of us have been alive, this indefinable thing, and now, after so many years, now we can finally put a name to it. And that name is “Sanjaya”. That’s why it’s so mind-bending when the judges diss Sanjaya, because by doing this they’re dissing the entire show, they’re dissing the last six years of their lives, they’re dissing the very thing that keeps them relevant. They’ve invented a popularity contest disguised as a singing contest, and now they want to disavow that it is a popularity contest at all. Maybe it’s all an act. Maybe it’s part of the joke. Maybe it’s part of their characters. Maybe Simon Cowell is really tongue-kissing Sanjaya backstage because he realizes that Sanjaya’s the best thing to ever happen to the show. Whatever. I just can’t understand how people say that Sanjaya is ruining American Idol when Sanjaya is American Idol. Like, brought to life. The purest essence of the show, collected, encapsulated, breathed into a living vessel, and wrapped up in a shiny do-rag. Motherfucker’s going to be president someday.
And so that’s why Sanjaya’s nickname is “Sanjaya”. Because it’s not a name, it’s a noun. It’s a thing.
And how about the show itself? It was country night, and my wife had the remote, so there was a lot of [Beep boop] going on. She fast-forwarded LaKisha before she even started singing, so I didn’t find out until today that she sang that hateful, hateful Carrie Underwood song about Jesus saving you from black ice. We really dodged a bullet there. Thank you, TiVo. Phil, I have to say, was the best of the night. And Dial Idol agrees with me, so maybe he finally climbed out of the bottom. And Blake was surprisingly boring, which he usually isn’t. He’s usually spot on with his song choices. But he gets massive points for taking a country song and making it sound not at all country. It’s called “making it your own,” something that Blake does every week, and alternately gets lauded or panned for. I still think that Blake is the only one of the bunch that I could legitimately imagine hearing on the radio, which is the same thing I said about Chris Daughtry last year. And look, he’s the only one I ever have heard on the radio. So things will probably be looking rosy for Blake, even if he doesn’t win.
And he’s not going to win, because Sanjaya is. Come on, Sanjaya is the perfect embodiment of everything American Idol is and stands for. He’s the perfect contestant, how can he not win? Dial Idol has him in last place this week, though, so maybe folks are starting to pay attention to his voice and ignoring those other 149 things. Could be trouble tonight. Stay tuned.
Do you see what Sanjaya’s doing to America? Do you?
These are weird times.
So Chris Sligh is gone. Eh. Won’t miss him. That’s not something I would have thought I’d ever hear myself saying even a month ago, but it’s true now. He started out pretty fantastic, in fact his first audition was the best out of all of them. But then he started slipping by degrees, each week getting a little worse. I used to be excited when I’d see him coming up, wondering what kind of performance he would put on. And I found myself disappointed each time. It got to the point where I was feeling…not dread, exactly, but more like “eh.” That’s all I would feel when I saw him. “Oh, yeah, whatever.” And this week I actually found myself looking forward more to Sanjaya than Chris Sligh, so that’s when I really knew it was over. And then when he came out and completely butchered a Police song, worse than anything even Sanjaya himself could have done? Yeah. Really over.
America agreed, so he’s gone. Chris also had no hook to set him apart. Like LaKisha has her voice; Melinda has the whole scared rabbit thing; Blake has his beatboxing and his being from the future; Phil looks like Gollum; Haley knows how to shake her boobs; Sanjaya has a whole box full of Sanjaya and is a magical creature all unto himself. Everyone has a hook that makes you remember them and makes you want to keep them around. But what does Chris have? The hair, that’s about it. He used to have an attitude, and some humor, but he took a jab at Simon early on and I think he got a talking-to behind the scenes, because all of a sudden it was all gone. It’s like when Tigger wasn’t allowed to Bounce anymore. The life was gone out of him. Leaving him with…what? His fat? His glasses? A whole lot of nothing was what he was left with, and I’m really surprised he didn’t go sooner. America just got tired of him.
So let’s go out remembering Chris for his greatest moment. And even this is 80% Blake.
I have made my peace with Sanjaya. There is plenty of outrage and confusion over his continued reign on American Idol. People are blaming Vote For The Worst and Howard Stern, although previous Vote For The Worst picks were Sundance and Antonella, and you see how well the site help them stick around. And Howard? Please. Howard Stern is even more irrelevant and washed up after his move to pay-only radio than he was before. His dwindling listener base keeps hoping that people are still paying attention to him, but they aren’t.
No, Sanjaya’s longevity on this show is just one of the mysterious vagaries of American Idol. Maybe it’s Indian-American voters putting him through. Maybe it’s the fact that he’s the only teenage boy. Maybe it’s million and millions of Ashleys out there. Or maybe, like everyone jokes, it really is the hair. Or it’s all of that put together. Whatever. He’s an unstoppable juggernaut on AI, and he’s going to cut down several singers who are better than him before he’s through, and I’m okay with that.
If the producers want to blame anyone they should blame themselves for putting him into the Final 24 in the first place. They had every opportunity to cut Sanjaya loose in Hollywood and put someone better in, but they didn’t take it. Maybe he really was better back then, and he hadn’t started to blossom into the never-ending high-school talent show he has become. Or maybe it’s true that they put bad people through, even in the final round, to make the show more exciting and give their favorites a better chance of being safe. I’ve got a working theory that this is how Taylor Hicks made it into the semifinals, more as cannon fodder than anything. If it ends up backfiring on them, they really can’t blame anyone but themselves.
Sanjaya, though is taking the suck to a new level. Not content with just singing badly, he’s now taken to assaulting our other senses. His rendition of “You’ve Really Got Me” last week was a fiasco on the level of Kevin Covais’ “Part-Time Lover”, but you know what? He owned that damn stage. And last night’s fauxhawk/ponyhawk/Marvin the Martian costume is just the latest sign that Sanjaya gets the joke. He’s come to realize that he’s nothing more than a punchline, and he understands that there are two options: either take the criticism and make an earnest try to do his best each week, ultimately failing and going home three weeks from now, or to just go balls out and become a full-blown circus. He, fortunately, has chosen the latter. He’s decided that if he can’t be good, then he can at least be horrible, and he can have some fun with it, and he can take his horribleness and stuff it in your face and make you eat it.
The good news is that Sanjaya isn’t as objectionable as some of the previous contestants we’ve had that we can’t get rid of. He’s no Constantine, for God’s sake, or Carmen Rasmussen or Kimberly Caldwell or any of the other “precocious little monsters”, as Simon put it, who not only got voted through week after week but who also made you want to put a boot through their neck. There’s nothing particularly wrong with Sanjaya, not in that way. You don’t hate him, he just can’t sing. And, sometimes, on American Idol, that’s not a problem. After all, as Peter Noone so perfectly put it last week (and I was really surprised to see such an on-point observation come from someone who’s more well-known for his infomercials than his music), “this isn’t a singing competition, it’s a voting competition.” Sanjaya kind of perfectly embodies that statement.
And so I’ve made my peace with Sanjaya. I see him as a representation of the “American Idol as Carnival” phenomenon, which I fully embrace. He’s even got Simon throwing up his hands and saying that what the judges say is irrelevant. Which is true, and has always been true, but for them to actually say it on the show, out loud, is kind of an uncomfortable fourth-wall-breaking moment. There’s a lie to this show, but the show is supposed to keep the lie going. That’s its job, and there’s an awkwardness that comes along with the lie being dissolved before our eyes. This is what Sanjaya is doing to the show. He’s blowing it up from the inside out, and he doesn’t even realize that he’s doing it, probably. I find myself starting to actually look forward to his performance each week, wondering what kinds of horrors he will unleash. And isn’t that what it’s all about, really? He’s taking the show to a new level, an admittedly weird one, but American Idol is hitting brave new frontiers where any good sociologist with a sense of humor could spend years dissecting what’s going on here. What going on with society, with the voting, with the ratings, with all of America. Sanjaya is indicitive of something in our society, and I don’t know what it is, but I’m having a hell of a lot of fun watching it unfold.
And according to Dial Idol, Sanjaya is safe, so it’s going to keep unfolding for a very long time.
The American public constantly fascinates me. I find it singularly amazing that American Idol viewers grew tired of Sundace and Antonella’s crap almost as quickly as I did. I mean, sure the both of them should have been gone the very first week, and I can think of at least four of the departed contestants that deserved to make it further than those two. But I really thought there was enough support for the both of them to keep them in at least a couple more weeks, especially given that Sundance was on top of the world so recently, and that Antonella had done an awesome job of getting her name out into the news. Just like in presidential elections, people vote more for the name they recognize than for the person they think will do a good job. I guess Vote For The Worst doesn’t have quite the pull they thought they had.
But even more surprising than those two getting booted, although not really, is the continued support for Sanjaya. I guess Sanjaya was able to catch the wave and ride it more successfully than the other two. If anything, I really would have pegged him as the one to go first out of the three of them.
But then there’s another puzzling phenomenon going on here, all the commenters who have bought into the fiction the show tried to sell us, that there was some kind of “bottom two” showdown between Sundance and Sanjaya, and that Sanajaya came out the victor there. And that their positions could have just as easily been reversed. And maybe during a normal show that all might be true, but this is still the semifinals, so there are two things being overlooked:
Personally, my dream would have been to see both Sundance and Sanjaya go home this week. Because in spite of all the made-up rivalry the show tried to throw at us, this was the last week that two (or four, actually) people were leaving, and the last time we could have knocked out this particular double-threat of suckitude. But, it didn’t happen, and all the teenage girls who vote for this thing screwed us over again.
I also found it funny the reaction we got from the judges, this palpable disappointment not only that Sundance was leaving, but that Sanjaya was staying in. Dudes, you’re the ones who put him into the final 24, you only have yourselves to blame. But poor Sanjaya; even Paula Abdul hates him. Paula, who wants a competition where all 80,000 people who audition get triple-platinum record deals, this Paula is visibly upset that Sanjaya is part of the final twelve. That’s some rough stuff right there.
And Simon? He’s said that if Sanjaya wins he’s quitting the show. Ouch.
