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The people have spoken and the formula has triumphed. This week, Melinda Doolittle, an unprepossessing 29-year-old black woman with hunched shoulders and one of the best singing voices to ever grace American Idol, was voted off the show. Next week's finale will feature two better-looking, younger and more personable singers with a fraction of Doolittle's musical talent.

Blake Lewis, 25, is a pleasant young white man who gussies up his unimpressive vocal delivery with some gimmicky beat-box moves; 17-year-old Jordin Sparks, a very pretty woman of mixed race, is sweet, sweet, sweet — and usually she can hold a tune. Visually, they may make for a nicely balanced duo, but you'd have to be a diehard Idol fan to find any excitement in a contest featuring this bland pair.

Of course, millions are fans – and with good reason: Idol has a genius for audience seduction.

Truth to tell, though, this has not been a good year on the most popular reality TV show in the world, and there are signs that its stranglehold on North American youth is loosening. Early in the season critics complained that Fox Television, which produces and broadcasts the show in the U.S., had sunk to a new low when it aired the embarrassing audition footage of a young man who appeared to be mentally handicapped. This spring, the performance segments used to winnow down the top singers were notable not for the stellar talent but rather for a running battle between the notoriously nasty British judge Simon Cowell and the sweet but musically incompetent Sanjaya Malakar.

The show, which selects winners through audience voting by phone and text messaging, continues to be dogged by various websites that attempt to predict or influence the outcome. Last season, Fox sent a cease-and-desist letter to Dialidol.com, a site that predicts who will drop off the show by measuring busy signals on the toll free lines American Idol sets up for each contestant. However, that only succeeded in shutting the site down for six days. (Dialidol, which boasts it achieved 91-per-cent accuracy this season, said the top three were so close it could make no prediction about this week's results.)

Meanwhile, votefortheworst.com took up Malakar's cause and got a boost when radio jock Howard Stern jumped on the bandwagon. Cowell appeared increasingly aggravated by Malakar's surprising survival, which may have been due to an anti-Cowell vote as much as any other factor. Viewers want to see the judges get tough, and these clashes are good for the ratings, but fans also complain about this season's lack of talent and decry the show's increasingly nasty tone.

Overall, ratings are slipping. An entertainment juggernaut and the most-watched show in America, American Idol increased its ratings every season until this one: It has dropped by as much as 15 per cent in some weeks. That's part of a general decline in television viewing this spring, but it can no longer be attributed merely to the early daylight savings that began in March. In Canada, American Idol remains, alongside CSI, the most-watched television show in the country, but ratings have followed a similar downward trend.

Whatever the future of American Idol, its imprint on the culture is now indelible. Created by British producer Simon Fuller following the model he originated with Pop Idol in the U.K., American Idol has packaged a generation of Ashleys and Jasons and sold them them as a form of interactive entertainment. These babies of the 1980s, raised on gallons of parental praise and family-room karaoke, are willing accomplices in the show's manipulation of their talents, whether that means exposing their pathetic delusions or celebrating their minor triumphs.

The decidedly middle-of-the-road songs the young contestants (age limit: 28) choose along with their relatively chaste performances (no wardrobe malfunctions here, please) have also guaranteed that their parents' generation is watching too. Indeed, asked to explain the show's success, insiders repeatedly point out that Idol, a surprising revival of the variety format in the age of niche entertainment, is the only TV that parents can actually share with their kids. The judges occasionally chafe against the teens' nostalgia for music recorded before they were born, but the producers feed those choices by featuring the likes of Tony Bennett, Barry Gibb and Jon Bon Jovi on the show.

The media marvel at Idol's impact on the music industry: this is not merely a game show but also crucial R&D that discovers new talent and test-markets it, too. And parents report its impact at the school talent night: now every kid thinks he or she is a soloist.

As always, Idol trades on the best and worst instincts of audiences. The show is something of a Jekyll and Hyde in that regard. It begins with the Darwinian struggle of the audition rounds where the untalented or the merely unlucky are shamelessly mocked – this season Cowell told one big-eyed contestant he looked like a bush baby – and ends with the celebratory final rounds that always leave judge Paula Abdul teary-eyed and grasping at superlatives.

Viewers, meanwhile, either squirm at the auditions and applaud the performance rounds, or the reverse. The audition episodes have proved increasingly popular over the seasons, and producers have given them more prominence ever since the public fell in love with the comically untalented William Hung, famous for his off-key rendition of Ricky Martin's She Bangs back in 2004.

The auditions may appear unscripted but, in fact, the producers rapidly sift through thousands of contestants in groups before allowing only the most promising — or the most laughable — to actually appear before Cowell, Abdul and their colleague Randy Jackson. This footage provides those moments of raw emotion on which reality TV so depends, and the producers exploit it shamelessly.

Earlier this season, for example, the show built up Minnesota contestant Jessica Rhode with a mini profile in which the sunny 21-year-old described her job as a makeup artist at the local mall and her lifelong ambition to be a singer, and then destroyed her, lingering voyeuristically on her devastated response to the judges' thumbs down as she wept in her parents' arms.

The flipside of poor Jessica's collapse are, of course, the American Dream tales of people like LaKisha Jones, the 27-year-old single mother, bank teller and gospel singer from Flint, Mich. She was eliminated this week, but not before she had belted her way onto the national radar with her stirring renditions of God Bless the Child, And I Am Telling You and Stayin' Alive. An orthodontist has now offered to fix her gap-toothed smile for free; stardom, or at least a career in the music industry to which she has so long aspired, beckons.

If the audition shows appeal to the sadist in us, the performance rounds seduce with charm – however banal the talent. Like a good soap opera, Idol begins with a dramatic cast of characters, including those sharply delineated judges: the perpetually sunny Abdul, the ever-measured Jackson and, most of all, the caustic Cowell, happy to play the villain of the piece. The contest — only one of these singers can emerge a winner — provides the show with its narrative arc. Finally, its pseudo-democracy of fan voting gives it a special hold over its audience. The judging encourages viewers to play armchair critic; the voting permits them to act on their opinions.

Like some politically palatable version of the beauty pageants of old, the combination is irresistible. Even if you dismiss the contestants and criticize the contest, you'll stay tuned to see who wins. The chat sites are filled not only with loyal fans but also severe critics, all of them intimately acquainted with the show. From the collapse of a Jessica to the elevation of a LaKisha, American Idol is, as one blogger so succinctly put it, like watching a car wreck in reverse.

The final performance show of American Idol airs Tuesday night on CTV. The results show airs the following night..