| Home > Commentary > Ed MartinTVBuzz.com > "American Idol": Save this Show! | |||||
"American Idol": Save this Show!
Last Updated: March 19, 2008 at 11:03 AM GMT By Ed Martin What the heck is happening to American Idol?
Last Wednesday's results show was atrocious – and the two-hour competition show on Tuesday wasn't all that great, either. Idol is too important to millions of people, not to mention Fox, to let the bad decision making on sudden sorry display continue unchecked.
Let's start at the top. Host Ryan Seacrest last week seemed to abandon his usual charm and masterful sense of control, leaping about as if he had sat on his own flat iron after a kick-ass performance by Chikezie. He then rubbed his hands on Chikezie's head, marveling at how wet the poor guy's head was! Seacrest bizarrely repeated the Chikezie head rub the following night, noting that his scalp was dry. “You're not sweating!” Seacrest cried.
Worse, Seacrest engaged in more poisonous and pointless exchanges than usual with judge Simon Cowell that served only to reveal what the two men have in common – an absolute lack of spontaneous humor. But Seacrest fared much worse, sounding strained and testy whenever he took shots at Simon.
I have always held Seacrest in high regard, but I like him much better when he focuses on the positive aspects of the show and directs good vibes toward the home viewer. If you have forgotten what a masterful showman Seacrest can be, watch the syndicated reruns of Season 2 on American Idol Rewind (the beginning of the post-Dunkleman period) and you'll see what I'm talking about.
Maybe Seacrest was thrown by the new Idol set, which on my television appears to be much larger than the set that served the franchise perfectly well during its previous six seasons. The new layout is, in a word, cavernous, and throughout the Tuesday and Wednesday telecasts it at times dwarfed the Idol contestants. The show's all-important intimacy was gone. This can be corrected with the right camera work and direction, but I wonder why it wasn't taken into account when the new set was designed. In fact, I wonder why a new set was necessary to begin with.
Cowell conducted a tour of the new set Monday on Oprah and summed it up with two words: “Star Wars.” Something in his tone suggested that he feels it's a tad overdone,too.
Perhaps the worst aspect of the new physical layout is the placement of hyped-up young people in the mosh pit area directly in front of the stage. What a dreadful distraction for the performers, judges and home viewers alike. Several Idols made the mistake of periodically directing their performances to the moshers rather than the cameras. (Did they learn nothing from Justin Guarini's highly skilled camera gazing in Season 1? It helped propel a singer of average talent to the No. 2 position.) Indeed, contestant David Hernandez seemed to focus the most on the moshers – and he got voted off! The judges looked annoyed by the sea of heads between their platform and the stage. I was annoyed, too. Watching at home, straight-on shots of the singers included the backs of too many bobbing heads and waving hands.
Apparently no one in the Idol think tank thought about the fact that television programs exist for the entertainment of the home audience first and the people in the studio second.
Also high on my list of complaints: The curious decision on someone's part to have the bottom-three vote getters once again sing the songs on Wednesday that were the home audience's three least favorite on Tuesday. WTF is that about? Shouldn't the top three vote getters – or three of the top six, or something like that – be asked to sing again? (Over on ABC's Dancing With the Stars, the performance that the judges think was the best on Monday night gets repeated at the top of Tuesday's results show.)
And what was the deal with that live call-in segment at the middle of Wednesday's telecast? It literally stopped the show – in the worst possible way. Leave the live question taking from home viewers to Larry King.
There was much more to gripe about last week, including a pointless segment about the Idol contestants attending the premiere of Horton Hears a Who! (like Idol a Fox property) and entirely too many taped segments of Idols talking about the splendor of their experience.
I didn't enjoy the performance by American Idol Season 5 runner up Katharine McPhee and super-producer David Foster, either, but I'll let that go as a matter of personal taste, because I know McPhee has a fan base, even if her debut album flopped. I'm always happy to see the more popular Idol contestants from previous seasons perform on the results shows. Season 5 finalist Kellie Pickler will be on hand tomorrow night. I would welcome return visits from Josh Gracin, Kimberly Locke, Tamyra Gray, Diana DeGarmo (she could perform the country song she composed for CMT's Gone Country), Justin Guarini, Constantine Maroulis, Chris Daughtry, Bucky Covington, Ace Young, Ruben Studdard, Fantasia Barrino and Bo Bice. When I saw Sanjaya Malakar sitting in the audience last Wednesday I held out hope that the producers might bring him up on stage to sing for a few minutes. A performance by Sanjaya, no matter how off-key, would have been welcome relief amid the torment and tedium of the hour.
Critics have for several years made a sport of trashing the Idol results show, insisting that it is five minutes of revelation and surprise buried in an hour of mindless filler. Some extremists have enjoyed putting down the performance shows, as well. Not this writer. I have since Idol began in the summer of 2002 done what I could to clear my schedule so that I may watch the competition and elimination shows live, when most of America does, and I have always enjoyed them (even when Sanjaya and Chicken Little were on stage). Over the years I have traveled to Los Angeles to attend several live telecasts and most of the season finales. And every year since 2002 I have named American Idol the Program of the Year or, at worst, one of the Top 10 on my year-end lists. (I ranked it No. 6 in 2007.)
At this point I am predisposed to love this show. But there was too much to not love last week. This is doubly grievous, because the Idol producers and judges appear to have cobbled together what may be the most talented group of singers in the history of the show. This should be the best season of Idolever, in every way.
Fox needs to address these issues, and fast, before the Idol audience, which is eroding this season despite the absence of significant first-run competition on the other networks, gets any smaller. I mean, it's still No. 1 by a wide margin, and after seven seasons most shows begin to lose steam no matter how popular they once were. But, like its fan base, Idol is something special and should be treated as such.
To communicate with or to be contacted by the executives and/or companies mentioned in this column, link to JackMyers Connection Hotline. 
Post a Comment
Reader Comments(0)
|
|
||||
Copyright 2007 Jack Myers. All Rights Reserved. Site powered by 
