"American Idol" was not part of my regular TV viewing fare until this season. This wasn't so much because I had contempt for the show, as many of my friends assumed, but because, until recently, our reception of network TV was very poor. Even so, after we got reception, I was so used to not watching network TV that I forgot all about it. And then there was the issue of time--I just don't watch much TV, even though we have satellite. I like the access and am willing to pay for it in case I need to watch something, but my own personal viewing is pretty much limited to a few minutes of Headline News, a few minutes of whatever is on ESPN and a couple of shows on the SciFi Channel, though I miss more episodes than I catch. And then I generally join my son Nicholas (11 years old today) for whatever he happens to watch, which consists of Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network material, like "Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends," "Jimmy Neutron" and "Naruto." I draw the line at "Pokemon" and "The Suite Life of Jake and Cody" (Disney). Bleggggkk!!
And then there was this massive buzz on campus. Phil Stacey, a Lee alum, was competing in "Idol." His lovely wife Kendra, another Lee alum who had been in several of my classes, came by one afternoon and we chatted about it briefly before she was off, zoom! to LA to join her idol man.
Phil Stacey (left)
I regret to say that I did not know Phil while he was at Lee and I have been trying to recall if we ever actually met, which suggests that if we did, the fact did not stick to my memory. Kendra, however, I recall as a warm and intelligent person. I concluded long ago that most men (including me) marry up. No offense to Phil, but I don't doubt he did, too.
So I watched a whole season of "Idol," more for Kendra's sake than for Phil's, surviving the barrage of emails and messages from people encouraging me to be a "power voter" like the drooling teen girls who were obviously using their text messaging prowess to vote endlessly for Sanjaya. But I confess I didn't. No offense to Phil, again, but I was more interested in the show as a phenomenon than as an interactive part of my life.
I wish I could remember who it was that told me that "American Idol" is the perfect made-for-TV event. It has all the elements one desires in TV viewing. It has common people striving for a lofty goal. It has suspense. It has raw entertainment value. It has consequences. It's the perfect edge-of-the-seat combo that drives the viewers into frenzies of partisanship, anger and euphoria. It has created an Internet subculture, a part of which engages in parody, some of it vicious, as in the "Vote For the Worst" website that claims to have kept Sanjaya in it for so long.
The show is not really about the vocals, despite "judge" Simon Cowell's protestations to the contrary. It is very much about performance and demographic identification. Those candidates with a halfway decent voice who were able to plug into a strong voting demographic tended to last longer than some who actually had more talent.
And, ultimately, the show is about advertising and making money for a very few people, such as Simon Cowell himself, a high-school drop out with enough business savvy and chest hair to survive and prosper in the recording business for a couple of decades.
It's easy to mock or parody the "American Idol" concept. They mocked themselves to a fair degree, which was refreshing, but they were also foolish where they tried to be serious--as in the clips showing the show's celebrities going to Africa or to depressed areas of the U.S. They could have done the fund raising without the awkward, forced clips of Simon's snug t-shirts being shocked by world poverty. As Neil Postman noted, TV is at its most worthless when it tries to be substantive.
But what about Phil Stacey? Arguably, he had one of the better male voices in the competition, possibly the best, but he had difficulty playing the camera. In fact, I'm not sure he ever quite figured it out. He just didn't seem to know how to make the camera his friend and so did not pick up the larger demographic that even Sanjaya, the butt of the show, was able to find. If Phil had discovered a little bit of Sanjaya in himself, he might have lasted longer, though winning it all was probably never a possibility, given the better female pool of talent.
It goes without saying that Melinda Doolittle was cheated by the process. There was no doubt that she was far and away the best performer and singer on the stage, but it was obvious from the finale that giggling adolescents were the primary voting bloc this season--and probably for future seasons.
I heard a variety of radio hosts bemoaning the fact that the show was ruined this season. But how can you ruin something as blatantly low-brow as this concept? The producers have tapped into democracy at its most raw, its most preoccupied and its most vulnerable. There is almost a compulsion to sit through the drivel and watch with fascinated awe the fashioning of nobodies into somebodies, unknowns into stars. As many of the contestants themselves remarked, it's an amazing, transformational process, "the dream," as they called it, the fairy tale of Zero to Hero. We don't have to worry about all the other nagging details, like Lakisha with her child, because all things truly unpleasant, the things that don't sell Ford cars and Coca Colas, are nicely edited out.
In the aftermath of "American Idol," I am now stuck watching "The Lot," a show I feel compelled to watch because of my personal interest in film.
And I absolutely love every awkward, ego-driven, conflict-crowded, salacious minute of it. Somehow knowing it appeals to the baser part of my nature only makes it more interesting.
