(Well, I started typing this before the finale, and finished it during the first few commercial breaks.)
The past year has seen a devastating earthquake in Haiti, flooding in Rhode Island and Tennessee, an oil drilling disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and the most boring season of American Idol in its nine-year history.
How have things come to this pass? I'm not entirely certain, but that's not going to keep me from rambling about my pet theories.
First, a few words on things the Idol producers got right over the years.
In the very first season of Idol, the judges were focused on finding specifically a pop idol, which included somebody who looked like a pop idol. One of the would-be finalists in that season was explicitly cut because -- although she could sing better than most -- she was on the heavier side.
They started backing off this in Season Two. None of that season's top three -- Kimberley Locke, Clay Aiken, Ruben Studdard -- would have been allowed to the semifinals in the first season, based strictly on looks. I think it's to the credit of the producers and judges that they recognized that they'd been focused much too narrowly the first time around, progressively widening the pool of people they'd consider over the years.
They also chose wisely in choosing the initial team of judges. Paula Abdul provided empathy, Simon Cowell provided criticism, and Randy... well, he was the filler in the sandwich, but that's not a bad thing. They formed a sometimes dysfunctional family, but they worked well together for seven seasons.
Ryan Seacrest may have turned out to be the biggest success story of all, and I'm being entirely serious. Ryan is faced with any number of challenges to keep the show running smoothly. If the judges are getting too silly, he has to pull it back to something resembling dignity; if it gets too portentous, he tends to tack to something that reminds us that this is -- at the end of the day -- a glorified talent show. He needs to try to build suspense when there isn't much. He needs to keep the pacing going. He's the ringmaster in a three-ring circus where the acts change every week. Does he get stuff wrong at times? Sure. But on the whole, the measure of his success is that he takes this insanely complex and challenging job and makes it look like any idiot could do it.
So where did they go wrong?
For one thing, they hired Kara.
I don't claim to have an inside line on the producers' thinking, but it looks like Kara was added to the mix partly to shake things up, but perhaps mostly because the American public was picking a distressing number of unmarketable Idols. (Taylor Hicks, anyone?) She's the corporate member of the team. And one problem is that she doesn't even have the sense to hide it. She's the member of the team most likely to talk about whether a given contestant fits into a pigeonhole -- which is a good thing from her standpoint. Predictability, marketability, being easily labeled... these are the virtues in Kara-world. And it completely flies in the face of the show's foundational myth, that America can choose people who wouldn't have made it through the conventional corporate machine.
Worse, she's taken Randy with her. Whether she's awoken the producer side of him, or whether he was afraid for his job last year and decided to step up his game, the upshot is that he's gone from being bland but an okay swing vote to being a secondary member of the Axis of Corporate Evil.
One last note on Kara. Her takeaway lesson from last season's Bikini Girl showdown in the finale was as follows: "It probably saved my job... It was a defining moment. Like, 'She's serious and industry, but also as kooky as everyone else on this panel.'" This explains a lot about her attempts to channel Paula this season.
Next factor: they lost Paula. It's hard to overstate this one; she's been missed terribly all season long. There's nobody left on the panel providing empathy. Ellen's just there to provide one-liners; Kara doesn't actually have a soul. Nobody's there to counterbalance Simon, and Simon's actually had to be nicer as a result, making him less effective as well.
Ellen... I can't get too worked up about her, except insofar as she represents a missed opportunity. She brings nothing to the table, but she's not actively hurting the show.
Then there's the Judge's Save. There's nothing good to say about this, either. It's a gimmick that gets in the way of the show's major mechanic in which the people choose.
And now Simon's leaving. Goodness knows who they're going to replace him with, but unless they purge the entire panel and start from scratch, I don't think they have a prayer.
With that said, two other factors seem worth mentioning.
One is that, dude, we've been watching this for nine seasons. There's not much that can happen that we haven't already seen. Lee's ascent would be more interesting if Kris hadn't done the same thing last year. Every development gets compared to years past; "this year's Sanjaya" has replaced "this year's McKibbin." The other week, an article I was reading (I forget where) casually compared Kara's seeming crush on Casey with Simon's on Christina Christian in season one, taking for granted that people would remember her. And we do. And perhaps that makes us jaded.
The other is that while I still consider it a virtue that they moved away from the initial focus on pop idols, too much of any good is bad, and it's possible that they've gone much too far. Marc Hirsh makes a persuasive case that Idol has become too much about niche contestants warping every theme into their own niches... and in a year in which only two out of six contestants sounded like they were even trying to do something resembling country music on Shania Twain week, it's hard to argue with this. What we've gained in diversity, we seem to have lost in versatility.
Are these the only factors? Probably not. But they seem to account for a lot.
Next questions: will I still be watching next year, without Paula and Simon in a tenth season? Will anybody else? Will X-Factor be any better? (And Simon manage to get Paula to join him on his new show?) Honestly, I don't know.
Ah well. On to the finale.
Posted by Shmuel at May 26, 2010 8:51 PM