Curse you, “American Idol.” You’ve got me again.
I could fill this whole column with all the things that are wrong with the Fox Network sing-off, everything from fuzzy judging logic to slipshod results reporting to the longstanding beefs about rewarding vocal histrionics and the “Hollywood Week” elimination rounds seeming to last a month.
I could pretend that I am only watching for work, just in case we get another local following Lee DeWyze into the show’s winner’s circle. Chicago’s best hope this year seems to be Chris Medina, the Oak Forest barista whose fiance is fighting to recover from a devastating car wreck and who has survived to the current competitor pool of about 60.
But the truth is simpler: I am enjoying the heck out of the series, even as I scoff vigorously throughout the episodes, and this has been true every time I have let myself get drawn in. While I wouldn’t call the show completely remade in this, its 10th season, I’ve been astonished to find I haven’t much missed Simon Cowell, the plainspoken producer who tried his villainous best to make the white V-neck tee-shirt into the black hat of the 2000s.
Replacing Cowell, comic Ellen DeGeneres and songwriter Kara DioGuardi with two front-line performers – Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler and dancer-turned-singer-turned-celebrity Jennifer Lopez – has given the show a new core of empathy.
Even as the soft-focus Lopez and the leathery, borderline lecherous Tyler seem unable to make the necessary hard calls – an absurd 320-plus auditioners were brought to “Hollywood Week” – they do project a genuine understanding of the young performers.
And that only underscores the central strength of this show, the reason it has consistently been TV’s top-rated series. Quibble with the very idea of a vocal competion. Rail at the way the popular vote methodology used in later rounds seems unfriendly to minorities. Note that there’ve been more Taylor Hicks’ than Kelly Clarksons spit out by this particular pop machine. But acknowledge that watching undiscovered people get their chance is first-rate theater, a fundamental show-biz dream played out in prime-time.
A decade into the reality-show era, series such as “Idol” and “Project Runway,” where the contestants actually have to demonstrate talent, are proving much more compelling than watching people navigate physical and psychological obstacle courses for their own sake, as on, say, a “Survivor.” And “Idol” gets extra points for being played out, in its final rounds, live, with all the extra drama that adds.
Next Thursday’s final pre-taped show will send 24 singers into March, when the live shows and popular vote begin. And I’ll be there on my couch, watching with my kids, making notes for my job, saying all the right skeptical things – but, honestly, being caught up in trying to detect talent and feeling, those moments when karaoke gives way to interpretation, and something big just might be beginning.