The days when "American Idol" was an enjoyable guilty pleasure appear over. This past season (the seventh) was aggravating in a way that no previous season has been. The show's many sins are becoming impossible to ignore, outweighing the fun of watching the performances and wondering who'll get voted off next.
1. The parade of washed-up mentors. What's more pathetic, the contestants pretending to be excited about meeting a music fossil like Neil Young, or someone like Andrew Lloyd Weber desperately trying to stay relevant and expand his audience by mentoring these mostly talentless kids? It's hard to say. One thing is certain: watching seven singers perform songs solely from the Dolly Parton catalog makes for a fairly tedious viewing experience.
2. The increasingly uselessness of Paula and Randy. With Randy Jackson, you do get usually a sense that the lights are still on. But with Paula, the windows are boarded up, wild cats live in the basement, and the front lawn's turned to dirt. Her incoherent ramblings have long since stopped being charming in their incoherence. Now it's almost impossible to stomach her vapid free-association ditherings, her refusal to say anything negative, and her rather sexist need to tell the girls how pretty they are. The show would be better without her. As for Randy, he may know music, but he's hopelessly inarticulate. Only Simon Cowell can be counted on to zero in on the performance's problem and offer a solution. He's almost always right.
3. The prostitution of product placement. The judges' omnipresent Coke glasses are one thing. And we'll admit that we actually like those hopelessly cheesy Ford TV spots that feature the Idols hamming it up in strange little vignettes (the Idols are office workers, the Idols are in the Wild West). But if you saw the season finale, you bore witness to a protracted infomercial for Mike Myers' new movie The Love Guru. It was an absolute embarrassment for everyone involved. The movie looks unfunny enough as is without having to create some stupid interaction between the two Idol finalists and Myers in character. It often seems like Fox will let anyone be on the show so long as the price is right. Do they ever say no?
4. The lack of taste among voters. First of all, it's hard to be completely sure if it's the audience voting these people off or if Fox is somehow calling the shots. Ryan Seacrest says only that the voting will be open "for at least two hours." Some believe Fox shuts down the voting when the Idol is wants to boot is in the bottom position. Be that as it may, time and again the more talented Idol gets the boot while some half-witted, tone-deaf knucklehead lives to sing another day. These twists aren't "dramatic" or "shocking" - they're proof of the shallow, ratings-driven nature of the entire format. The producers wanted a David versus David showdown fairly early in the season and guess what? They got it. David Archuletta is a wispy-voiced, one-trick-pony simpleton, but he's also a cute, sexless-and-safe Mormon kid that a certain demographic loved. He's in!
"American Idol" ratings were down this season for the first time, which suggests the new is at last wearing off and audiences are coming to the same conclusion as The Cheese Fry. The producers are planning some changes for season 8. But it may be too late.
You can fool some of the people some of the time, but even fools will eventually get sick of listening to Paula Abdul.
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I agree, to an extent. You are dead-on with Paula Abdul and Simon. Thank god for Simon's honesty. But oddly enough this is the first season I watched all the way through. Though I largely have TiVO to thank for that, I still enjoyed the season's opening shows, with its exploration of vocal charlatanism. There were a few annoying, I'd-like-to-blow-up-my-TV-now-thank-you-very-much episodes, but for the most part I enjoyed the "Davids" showdown. I think the more interesting point might be that the ratings of the winner after each individual season never matches the ratings of the TV show itself. I think that, but for Kelly Clarkson, it is a great example of flash-in-pan fame.
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