In case you haven’t heard, this season’s American Idol is THE BEST EVAR!!!  With the MOST TALENTED CONTESTANTS EVAR!!!  And the performances are THE GREATEST EVAR!!! Making this season, naturally, THE BEST SEASON OF ANYTHING EVAR!!! DON’T MISS AN EPISODE!!!!!

My family really only started watching American Idol regularly a couple of years ago when our kids got really interested – we had watched bits and pieces of earlier years, but never really made it part of our week.  But this is now the third season we have watched since the beginning, and it is likely to be the last.  The reason is that while we are still having fun with it this year, the blatant shift in focus has poisoned it for my kids.  It is all over the radio stations they listen to as well – American Idol as we once knew it is dead.

The goal of the process is still the same – working through more than a hundred hopefuls to provide viewers with a broad set of choices while hopefully ensuring that the top few will be marketable talents.  The problem – the show has gone from weeding out the best untried amateurs to stacking the ‘Top 24’ with talent likely to succeed in a commercial setting.  The reasons for this are two-fold and obvious.  First, the whole ‘Sanjaya’ thing last year was an obvious embarrassment to the show, making it look like a farce.  It was obvious even last year that the show wanted to be rid of whatever notoriety came from that.

The other reason for the change is perhaps more serious – the winners and runners up have done a lousy job of selling records and the ‘top 10’ tours are no longer doing a good job of ‘putting butts in seats’.  Releases from last year’s winner and runner up barely made a whimper on the charts; the top two from the year before have done quite badly as well – indeed, their quick fall from the chart might be marked as the ‘end of the Idol era’.  Looking at the overall impact of the show, we have three true ‘stars’, including a hot selling artist who started distancing himself from the show the second he was voted off.

And if that wasn’t enough, the show has fallen back on to self-congratulatory aggrandizements on such a regular basis that it really stands out.  My opening paragraph was inspired by my older son pointing out over a commercial “I can’t wait until the commercial is over … because then we get more of the best performances ever by the best contestants ever!”.  And just in case the show is as ‘OVAR’ as it seems, the judges have started using it as a launch pad for their own careers – starting with Paula and Randy’s new video.

So now we have a top 24 that is stacked with professionals and folks who have already been making a push at a singing career, and Paula Abdul went as far as to say that if you haven’t already been pushing for a career that you don’t deserve to be on the show.  That is a far cry from things that Randy and Simon have said in the past such as “We’re out to find the best undiscovered talent and really herald that.”.  There are at least a dozen of the top 24 who have made failed attempts at launching careers in the past.

So is the talent better … or just safer?  Judging by the first week of public eliminations, I would vote for just plain dreadful.  While they have clearly avoided the ‘Sanjaya Factor’, they also don’t have anyone all that interesting.  There is clear talent – but also an utter lack of personality and originality.

My younger son had hoped to audition someday for American Idol.  I don’t know if he would ever have done that, but it would have been nice to let him try and know that his chances would be the same whether or not he had started working connections in the music biz.  But now we are faced with uncertainty – is the problem that you didn’t do well, or that you weren’t connected enough.

In other words … back to the same old music biz!

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