As pretty much all of you know because you’ve all been watching, blogging, and obsessing over it (how could you not), the latest season of television juggernaut American Idol is again underway, eating up 5 hours a week of post-strike air time for Fox. Idol, no matter what you think of the actual show, is simply a stunning institution - artful in the simplicity of its idea but also impressively diverse in its innovations and extensions.
For one, Idol is unique in that it is the rare television show that drastically changes its content midway through the season. The midseason shift from the show’s auditions to the top 24 performances (bridged by the now criminally short “Hollywood week”) is quite significant. Watching the auditions is essentially an exercise in making fun of the delusional and often strange fringes of American society. It’s a bit of a cruel exercise but it is undoubtedly a fascinating one, and it’s also a world away from the 2nd half of the season, where the show is almost entirely made up of performances by those who can (supposedly) sing. This is the equivalent of 30 Rock halfway through the season morphing into a docu-drama about inner city drugs.
Idol also serves as a perfect example of corporate sponsorship done incredibly well. We’ve got the passive sponsor, Coke, who appears in the show every week as the cups in front of the judges. I’m not sure they’ve even said the words “Coke” on the show, but not only are the glasses ever present, but their opaque nature has spurred speculation about their contents (”what IS Paula drinking”). Then you’ve got Ford, who appears every week in the season’s latter half as the contestants make musical commercials for Ford products which the show feeds us when we’re supposed to be getting NON commercial content. It’s unbelievable. We come back from commercial break. Ryan shows us a Ford commercial with our aspiring idols. And people applaud. Every week, millions of viewers watch a Ford commercial, pay attention to it, maybe remember it because it has their favorite idol doing x,y,z and then see an audience full of people applaud for that commercial. This has to be an advertiser’s dream.
Finally, you’ve got the fact that this show airs 3 nights a week for 5 hours in total. That’s nearly 25% of an entire SEASON of any normal show. But to their credit, Fox has been smart with Idol. Even though the seasonal push is hard, they’ve also stayed away from running the show more than once a year, a tactic that saves it from “Who wants to be a millionaire”’s fate, wherein ABC literally started running the show in prime-time, daytime, and every time, and the fad faded out faster than Savage Garden (how’s THAT for a reference?). Meanwhile, in the “off-season”, Idol winners are releasing records and touring. The brand is still around, but it’s not present enough all year round enough to truly hate it.
And as cynical as one can be about the show, you also can’t deny the essential truth of the show - it is American - in all of the ways Fox wants it to be (coming from nowhere to be successful, the American dream, diversity of its contestants, democratic) as well as in ways less glamorous (making fun of the strangest among us, obsessing over trivial things, perceiving originality in what is by definition cover performances). In many ways, American Idol really does capture what America is all about, warts and all.
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