American Idol Is Back and Easy to Ignore
Entertainment
We can debate whether or not we need American Idol back so soon—it only went off the air two years ago, which means the gap between getting the boot and being rebooted is shorter than ever. One day that gap will cease to exist, and then what? Some version of the singularity where the computers take over but all they do is call us stupid and laugh at us randomly? Oh wait, that’s already happening.
Anyway, the observation I was setting up before I had a vision was: We can argue about the usefulness of Idol’s return, but what’s undeniable is that Sunday’s Season 16 premiere delivered a dump truck of melisma. Of course it did. I don’t think I’ve heard a run as absurd as that of Koby, and I listened to Christina Aguilera’s “The Christmas Song” as recently as December (more for scientific observation than for fun). (And yes, that’s Koby like the beef, but no she doesn’t enjoy being compared to cuts of meat, per her exchange with judge Katy Perry, which had a snippy undercurrent.) It took Koby about 50 seconds to sing, “The devil never stops coming for you/For you.” That’s five and a half seconds per word. As the planet slowly overheats, Koby could sing the elegy of our species. Who’s to say that she isn’t doing exactly that already?
That’s to say, look, there’s still some fun to be had in enjoying the harmless side of extreme human behavior that manifests when eccentrics who don’t have a shot at 15 minutes of fame gladly settle for two or so during the American Idol audition rounds. Season 16, for which the show has pivoted from Fox to ABC, introduced us to a virgin, a sock collector, the winner of some kind of American Idol-esque show in Russia, and a guy whose hard life was succinctly summed up by the hole in his acoustic guitar. I watched with my boyfriend and we laughed a lot for a little while until drifting away from the couch and paying less and less attention as time went on (he started drawing and I started ironing). It was like a family holiday gathering in which the question you initially ask yourself—“Why don’t we do this more often?”—is eventually answered—“Because it kind of sucks???”—as the night wears on.
It’s been a while since I’ve tuned into Idol. Trent Harmon, Nick Fradiani, Caleb Johnson, Candice Glover: These names mean nothing to me. I’m willing to bet they don’t mean much to you either. That’s a list of the past four winners of the show, which at its peak was a guaranteed ticket to No. 1 on at least a chart and a shot at cultural relevance beyond the Idol association. Hey, Kelly Clarkson’s hanging in there. I saw her on a talk show a few weeks ago. She’s on…The Voice.
Ratings, too, plummeted as Idol dragged itself along—the Season 15 finale had 13.30 million total viewers; nearly three times as many people watched Taylor Hicks (remember him???) win the Season 5 finale, which nabbed 36.38 million viewers. (The Season 15 finale was likely boosted by the since-broken promise that it would be the last Idol ever—the Season 14 finale had just over 8 million viewers.)