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.
